AI based personalized learning in ‘The Diamond Age’: Artificial subversiveness and human feeling machines

This paper examines visions of AI-personalized learning through an analysis of Neal Stephenson’s Science Fiction Novel ‘The Diamond Age’. While contemporary discourse is often characterized by deterministic visions of AI-based personalization as a panacea to the homogenization and standardization of mass schooling, the novel presents a more nuanced view, both extending and problematizing such narratives. Namely, it portrays AI as key to cultivating subversive individuality that rises above existing social structures and norms. However, the novel also highlights how the impact of personalization depends on factors beyond the technology itself. Drawing on postphenomenological theory, I analyze the four different use cases of an AI-based educational device—The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer—presented in the novel: primer-as-education, primer-as-entertainment, primer-as-escape and primer-as-training. These four stabilities function as a conceptual roadmap for thinking about current models of AI-based personalization, distinguishing how the Primer’s impact varies according to two factors: background experiences and human emotional connection. The combination of these two is needed for the emergence of composite human-technology intentionality, where AI is depicted as supporting users’ capacity to become subversive—to shape their own aims. Despite this nuance, the novel’s conceptualization of human-technology relations is nevertheless plagued by two problematic dichotomies, which are also prevalent in contemporary discourse: (i) between experiences on-and-off the screen, overlooking the more pervasive influence technology has on society and education; (ii) between cognitive and affective aspects of education, relegating decision-making to AI systems, thus paradoxically positioning humans as feeling machines.