Automating the Human Mind
July 10, 2025
It’s striking how little turmoil the dawn of AI is causing at top universities across the country. Big Tech companies are moving quickly to embed AI products into every layer of American education. In June of last year, Google announced that it was offering Google Gemini to teens through their school accounts, and the New York Times recently revealed plans by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to embed ChatGPT into “every facet of campus life.”
Compare today’s quiescence with the outrage of 1964. Back then, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley reacted violently to the revelation that a university laboratory was operating an IBM computer, which was seen then as the manifestation of all things bureaucratic, corporate, and technological—the antithesis of free learning. (This was before the ideology of the PC, with its utopian vision of the computer as an anti-bureaucratic, liberating force.) Graduates and undergraduates protested by burning IBM punch cards, which, back then, supplied the computer with commands and were used to register students for classes. Graduate student and movement leader Mario Savio’s famous speech recalls the anti-technology element of the student protests, which we have largely forgotten:
