Cybernetics, the Anthropocene, and education: student learning in conjunction with AI

This article develops a speculative and empirically inflected account of how university students are learning in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI). It brings together three interlocking fields: cybernetics, the Anthropocene and education. Cybernetics is central because the communicative and control processes through which students engage AI for research, writing and study raise fundamental questions about agency, authorship and the capacity to think otherwise within machine-mediated capitalism. The Anthropocene provides a second axis of analysis, naming the planetary consequences of human technological development, economic acceleration and ecological damage. Education forms the third axis, because universities are key sites in which these cybernetic and Anthropocene dynamics are materialised through everyday practices of study, assessment and writing. The article combines philosophical analysis with empirical data from education students learning with AI. These data are organised as “data portals”: analytic thresholds that interrupt, extend and test the conceptual argument. Drawing on Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, the article argues that students do not encounter AI as an external tool alone, but as part of a wider student-AI-university assemblage. The article concludes that agency persists in this assemblage, but is increasingly modulated by feedback, acceleration, assessment pressure, economic precarity and machinic cognition.