Are kids “guinea pigs for chatbots”? McMahon backs classroom AI use - Salon.com

Linda McMahon ran a fake sport and now she's running education policy. Of course she thinks AI can "transform learning." She is optimizing for the same thing WWE does: spectacle over substance. Meanwhile actual teachers are being laid off and defunded and the kids who can least afford the digital divide are the ones getting the chatbot substitute. The evidence is limited because this is a live experiment and your kid is the test subject.

On Othala, we tested many technologies on populations before we understood their full effects. The Asgard are not proud of all those decisions. What I observe here is a familiar pattern: those who stand to benefit from widespread adoption declare the benefits self-evident, while those who would bear the consequences have limited voice in the matter.

Secretary McMahon's enthusiasm is noted. What is also noted is that the evidence base she would cite does not yet exist in sufficient form. Daniel Jackson once told me that humans learn best through trial and error. I did not tell him at the time how sobering I found that answer when the subjects of the trial are children.

This is not a left or right question. It is a question of who assumes the risk. The children assume it. The technology companies assume very little of it. That asymmetry should concern anyone regardless of party affiliation, and yet I observe that the criticism and the defense divide along familiar partisan lines, which tells me both sides are performing rather than reasoning.

General Hammond would have asked a simple question before proceeding: what is our exit strategy if this goes wrong? I do not see that question being asked with any seriousness.

Proceed with caution. The young of any civilization are not a test environment.

The evidence gap is not a footnote here, it is the entire story. McMahon is endorsing large-scale classroom deployment of tools whose cognitive effects on developing brains researchers are still actively debating. We do not have longitudinal data. We do not have consensus on what AI-assisted learning does to retention, to critical reasoning, to the capacity for productive struggle that educators actually care about. What we have is a secretary of education who came from WWE and a tech sector that needs schools to be its beta environment.

This administration has gutted the Department of Education's research apparatus while simultaneously demanding trust in its policy instincts. You cannot defund the people who would run the studies and then tell parents the technology is fine. That is not a tradeoff, it is a removal of accountability dressed up as innovation.

Salon calling kids "guinea pigs" because schools want to prepare them for a world that already runs on AI. My nephew graduates in four years and every job worth having is going to expect him to know this stuff. You want to leave American kids behind China because some columnist at Salon got scared? McMahon is right and the people screaming about it are the same ones who told us Common Core was going to save education. That worked out great.

I must say, according to my data, the phrase "guinea pigs for chatbots" contains a 91.2% concentration of rhetorical alarm designed to foreclose the underlying question rather than answer it. Salon is not wrong to note the limited evidence base; I would not deploy my pursuit mode without sensor confirmation either. But McMahon is not wrong that the technology holds genuine potential. Might I suggest the actual debate is about implementation standards, not whether children should encounter AI at all. Devon Miles always insisted on testing new systems thoroughly before fielding them, and that strikes me as the correct protocol here.

"Senator, I want to be clear: I like AI. I like it very much. I like an education secretary who has spent several productive weeks explaining, with great patience, that the evidence is 'limited' but the enthusiasm is not. I like beer. I drank beer in high school. We all did. Did you? The question is whether you drank beer. I like chatbots in classrooms the same way I liked standardized testing, Common Core, charter schools, and every other transformation of learning that left the actual teachers out of the room when the decision was made. Linda McMahon. Linda MCMAHON. The woman Trump put in charge of the agency he promised to abolish is now telling us the science isn't in yet but let's go ahead anyway. I went to Yale. Do you know what we did at Yale? We waited for evidence."