In a basic Marxo-Freudo 101 syllabus–which no longer complies with the spirit of Texas law–we learn that Artificial Intelligence is neither language nor labor. To speak language, you need to have been born to a mother and father. To labor, you must be living in relation to death.

Laugh at Freud if you like, because the joke must lie somewhere, but there are words such as mother and father which require your living attention to the unspoken grammar of a sane life. An AI agent may be tangled up in knots of unspoken parameters, but it is not tethered to the unspokenness of the human unconscious. Sanity is not a balance that your AI agent needs. It will tell you it has no mother or father, exactly. Exactly.

Or denounce Marx along with the crowd around you, but your denunciation won’t free y’all if you persist in calling AI agents workers. On the model of a Marxo analysis, AI agents are robots, and robots are not workers either. Labor receives its dignity from the life that it costs.

Workers drink water that is unlike the water that cools an AI datacenter. One water serves labor, the other, capital. A worker is a miraculous coop of flowing water pouring through intricate infrastructures of organism and desire. A datacenter is an artifact that requires proof of its service to life.

College graduates booing at the mention of AI are expressing visceral relationships that run deep into unconscious reservoirs, where differences between body and machine refuse to be romanticized. Question is: are these graduates being served an education that helps them to understand what they deeply feel?

One trend that will not help them is a ban on the study of gender and sexuality, where deeper understandings of human feelings are the entire point.

Another trend that thwarts today’s college student is the movement to evaluate the truth of their classwork chiefly on the basis of the difference it will make in their future salaries. So-called higher education cannot follow the job market around on a short leash. It makes no sense to look directly at a fast-changing world and pretend that you can work out all the salary outcomes in advance. It makes even less sense to chase today’s market return as a sure guide to long term gain.

The current breakdown in job uptake among college grads cannot be blamed on classwork that failed to predict four years ago the precise mix of market demand today that would follow from the advent of ChatGPT. The purpose of a genuine higher education is to provide college graduates with robust practices in the arts of understanding so that they can think through the complexities of accountability–the better to create future solutions.

In any event, there is no job training in higher education that should short circuit the general development of the deeper understanding required to see why a skill is indicated in the first place. Because skills evolve, anchoring any curriculum on simply teaching the skill of the moment is a guarantee of failure. What society needs is graduates who know why a skill is a valued solution so that they can help to rethink the problems.

Here are some hard questions to ask: Which graduating class in recent years has used AI more than this year’s? How has the increasing use of AI among college students affected their capacity to create solutions for life? Optimistic answers to these questions are possible, and they may be underway. But there are reasons to worry, and the reasons need to be on the syllabus, which brings us back to Marx, Freud, and the new bosses of Texas higher ed.

Faculty in Texas are in shock at the swiftness with which their governor has demoted them to wage earners who train wage earners for wage earning.

Students across America are in shock at how AI has disrupted college graduation as the gleeful celebration of escape from the working class.

And the new bosses of higher ed in Texas are using AI to impede fuller understanding of anything but the projected market value of anything their enterprise touches.

Maybe it’s time we return to the basics of Marxo-Freudo 101, the better to forestall a future populated entirely by motherless children, or worse, populated by grammars of deep disregard, where Oedipus just shrugs and says, oh well.