Between algorithms and humanism: a Freirean posthumanist essay on AI and social commitment

Abstract

The massive emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Brazilian and Argentinian educational settings reopens, in an unprecedented way, the historical tension between technique and humanization. This theoretical-critical essay, aligned with the dossier Between Algorithms and Humanism, articulates the Freirean tradition of social commitment, contemporary algorithmic critique and posthumanist renewal to address this tension. The aim is to construct an original conceptual framework, named PHARE (Humanizing Pedagogy for Reflective and Emancipatory AI), applicable to teacher education and pedagogical practice in the Ibero-American space. The methodological approach is hermeneutic-critical, organized in three movements: diagnosis of algorithmic rationality, Freirean recovery of the concept of viable unprecedented in dialogue with Susana Copertari, and posthumanist synthesis around the conceptual figure of the deaf-cyborg assemblage, formulated to situate the deaf body as a privileged laboratory of algorithmic ethics. The PHARE framework comprises five guiding principles: algorithmic dialogicity, epistemic transparency, distributed agency, decolonial commitment, and emancipatory horizon with radical accessibility. We conclude that Ibero-American pedagogy of AI requires both the denunciation of the colonial configurations of technique and the invention, in the horizon of the viable unprecedented, of modes of appropriation that honor Latin American education historic commitment to peoples, languages and bodies historically silenced by algorithmic phonocentrism.