Towers of Babel : Academic Labor in the Age of AI

This essay argues that R. F. Kuang's 2022 novel Babel rejects "dark academia"'s fetishistic attachment to the cloistered "ivory tower." Instead, it reads the novel—which explicitly takes up language and automation—as an allegory for the problem of mechanization in higher education. It narrates the speculative history of efforts to deskill and automate the labor of teaching via "teaching machines": from early-twentieth-century experiments with radio and film, to mid-century "AutoTutors," to millennial innovations in computer assisted education, and finally to contemporary AI. Babel , it contends, suggests possible resources for imagining a labor resistance to ed-tech automation born in the university.