Transcript: News Interview from Former Downsview Teacher

In a CP24 News Interview from September 2040, Former Downsview Secondary Teacher, Connie Abietzio (X/42), who was laid off as a result of the cuts, shared their views on the establishment of Pure Tech Secondary and its disposal of all staff members:

“I may be biased, but what kind of economy are we striving towards if robots displace all of our jobs? It may be one set of teachers from one school now, but what about in ten, twenty years from now? Surely, there won’t be an equivalent number of job openings in the development of these Artificial Intelligences to outweigh the number of jobs that have become obsolete, and I just don’t know what we’re going to do when unemployment rates are skyrocketing. Just the other day, I went to the grocery store and saw they’ve completely done away with in-person checkouts. Every self-checkout is invigilated by a camera, and only one person is needed to watch those cameras. Why are we even sending these kids to school just to graduate them into a world that doesn’t need to employ them? Like, come on, I get the government wants to cut costs, but unless these robots are being asked to pay income taxes, where does it end?

Connie Abietzio

And forget about the complete economic collapse that I think AI is going to cause, what kind of people are we raising in a world that’s striving to be run by emotionless computers with no capacity for complex thought? Those students at Downs– sorry… Pure Tech are still adolescents going through puberty, mental health struggles, bad days, and overwhelming changes in their lives; except now they aren’t even face-to-face with peers who are going through the same things. At their age, I was at a point in my development where I was struggling so much with my gender identity and what it meant to be nonbinary. This was at a time when we were just on the cusp of starting to understand what that meant, and it wasn’t for another five or six years that the importance of pronouns became more widely understood and talked about. Even then, it was nowhere near as common practice as it is today, and I was misgendered a lot during my teenage years, especially because social media made me believe I really didn’t have a right to be asking people to use language they weren’t used to using even though it validated who I was as a person. When you’re an adolescent, you just assume that if someone tells you, you have no right to be asking for something, that it’s true, and if I hadn’t at least had the support of my friends and teachers to affirm that wanting to be respected for who I am was valid, I never would have made it through high school. Do you think these holographic teachers that are literally being programmed for instructional purposes only are going to have the nuance necessary to support diverse communities like the LGBTQIA2S+ students? AI doesn’t see these students, it can’t see them, and it can’t possibly understand what this time in their lives is like. It has a completely one-dimensional view of education, and these students are going to suffer the consequences of that. I still laugh when I think about the Minister's letter, I mean, come on: "without compromising the quality of teaching" was the biggest stretch of this century! Whatever helps him sleep at night, I guess...

Sorry for going on such a rant, I don’t want to take up so much of your time, but I really believe the path our society’s on is a scary one, and I don’t just say that for fear of being put out of a career entirely. I guess the bottom line is, if our youth are raised by computers that have never undergone the human experience, I just don’t see what’ll be left of our humanity when it’s all said and done.”