Tomorrow’s Networked Posthumans: Phenomenological Reflections on the Child and Artificial Intelligence

While networked learning (NL) is most often associated with adult learning and professional work practices, examining the education and development of children in the context of today’s global networks is also relevant to NL research. This chapter asks: What child-technology-world relations are being forged in our posthuman era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data and global networks? What visions of the future of learning do these complex relationships anticipate? We begin by scanning the intensifying presence of networked AI technologies in the home life of infants, toddlers and preschoolers, then turn to two philosophers who have speculated on the meaning of an AI-infused future for children and youth: Michel Serres and Bernard Stiegler. Serres envisions tomorrow’s child as a new spiritually open being cradling its machinical head in its hands; Stiegler worries this numbing decapitation by the sword of the digital will undermine the child’s developing attentional structure—a critical consciousness once won through print technology—and resituate it in a deeply programmed, synthetic substratum. Finally, we consider how their phenomenological reflections might provide insight for educators as they endeavour to make critically informed technology choices for children as well as consider implications for networked learning and postdigital education.