Our contemporary universities exist in a vortex of financial and managerial forces. In this storm, AI is nothing new. It is an archaic educational technology, a simple machine and form of capital, enabling the subsumption of academic labour and the production of vast educational commodities for profit. Already dead labour, AI animates managerial monstrosities (Pixarfication) whilst reanimating the corpses of dead lecturers.
Paradoxically, the suicide of the capitalist university through AI may reconstitute new forms of education based on inevitably superior HI (human intelligence) and cooperation.
John Preston is the author of several books including Artificial Intelligence in the Capitalist University (2021) and Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge against Cybernetics (2025) (with Rhiannon Firth). His forthcoming book is Apocalypse Capitalism: Economic Visions after Nuclear War (2026). John’s research is on existential threat, disasters and crisis in education and knowledge production. His most recent appointment was as Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex.
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