As mentioned in my previous posting, I don't subscribe to a dialectical approach to addressing contradictions between human and artificial intelligence.

Human & Artificial Intelligence as Balancing The Yin-Yang of Pricing (Costs) and Valuing

To begin with it, it has become virtually impossible, much less desirable to overturn what essentially boils down to a very human notion: pricing and valuing. So it is never, at the core, an issue of human beings versus machines. It is about our desires and appetites, therefore conversely, fears and wastes/ excesses (as either scarcity or abundance). The key here is balance, rather than dialectics, specifically how to balance price (costs - to whom?) and valuing (for and by whom?).

Beyond Pricing and Valuing Human Intelligence in Utilitarian & Developmental Values

As Noam Chomsky has reminded us, intellectual property is the monopoly of pricing. The notion of intelligence as a monetary expression, subjected to and situated within the supplies and demands of brain power markets, has utilitarian and developmental values.

From here, I am going to superimpose the prevailing discourses in Education and Engineering. It may not even be up to date, but one has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is 2012, in the Game Studio of UTS' (University of Technology, Sydney), Faculty of Engineering and IT.

Social Engineering Rhetorics, Aesthetics, Poetics & Epistemologies

Among Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers' choice of readings and citations are the works of Ian Bogost. Wikipedia describes him as a Philosopher and video game Designer. This sounds like a reasonable description, though worth also highlighting is his background in the Comparative Literature. Bogost's seminal work is Procedural Rhetoric.

For the engineers, this reading of games and their meanings, especially in relation to the player and game mechanics was compelling. Bogost also covers lots of ground in terms of the games' aesthetics, epistemologies and therefore rhetorics. His interpretations of video games are dense, and with NOT a statistic in sight. Instead it would help immensely if one had solid Humanities training to follow Bogost, especially Derrida. And yet his following are composed of arguably mostly gamers and game engineers. Where I personally had left Bogost was the debate he was having with Sicart.

• Essentially, one might boil down the problem of what is the autonomy between the player and the game mechanics?

Curiously, that engineers are concerned with player autonomy and expression is something missing in Education's discussion of game-based learning. Sure there's always James Gee, everyone's favourite baby boomer, who could tell us: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy?

For now, I will skip Gee because I have already written a paper about him and David Williamson Shaffer. What I would like to talk abit about is the notion of epistemic games and their assessment engines. This is necessarily sketchy and my purpose is raise my concern as agenda.

There's no doubt that epistemic games, still in their early days I would say in Education, have much to contribute to learning. Their applications could also be as deep as the ocean.

The Misreading of Episteme: Implications & Delusions

But what keeps glaring in my gaze is: why haven't we acknowledge also the Foucault "episteme" and "techne" in their oppressive light?

Even Shaffer alludes to Foucault, but the oppressive nature of the "episteme" is totally lost on him, to quote him (Shaffer, 2006: p.232):

Epistemic frames thus include, but are a broader concept than, epistemic understanding, epistemic forms, and epistemic games. An epistemic frame is more akin to Foucaults (1972) well-known concept of episteme. The episteme of an era, for Foucault, is the relationship between discursive

practices (patterns of discourse or forms of interaction) and structures of knowledge (which for Foucault are always intertwined with the organization of power).

Episteme exists at the level of the culture, across domains of knowledge and forms of practice. Epistemic frames may represent a similarly tight linkage between practices and ways of knowing, but at the level of the local cultures developed by individual communities of practice.

The data here are clearly illustrative rather than conclusive. Nonetheless, they do suggest that islands of expertise and epistemic frames may be useful ways to think about the potentially broad effects of experiences in well-designed educational role-playing games and other immersive environments.

The ability of students to incorporate epistemic frames into their identities (or portfolio of potential identities) suggests a mechanism through which sufficiently rich experiences in technology-supported simulations of real-world practices (such as the games described above) may help students deal more effectively with situations in the real-world and in school subjects beyond the scope of the interactive environment itself.

Epistemological Imprisonment & Physical Incarceration

What this interpretation of Foucault reveals is that Shaffer has not just misunderstood the coercive and dangerous nature of the "episteme", especially when embodied through the "techne" (his equivalent, I would say, of the epistemic frame), it means the epistemic games or learning is also based on questionable understanding of the "episteme".

Foucault had been concerned with how knowing and knowledge, far from being enlightening, work to limit and constrain its subjects of possibilities, at its worst, would lead to epistemic incarceration. In short, there's nothing inevitably liberating about one's epistemology. The "episteme" is a site/ knowledge matrix, when enacted in the "techne", becomes extensive sources of incarceration, discipline and punishment. Hence whilst one's head is imprisoned by the "episteme", one's body is being violated by the epistemic processes embedded in an institution's "techne".

There's lots to come from this reading of Foucault. One key aspect is that Education people are losing their capacity to read Philosophy and the Humanities. In fact, they risk losing many other literacies, not least the visual ones.

Balancing Learning about Knowing with Knowing about Learning

This is a curious deficiency given if it's one Faculty, literally in that sense, that should be about cultivating deep and broad literacies. Even the ways in which educational products and services are assessed and evaluated (a good example of Foucault's Episteme at work) have fallen sort in their capacities to read issues relating to Ethics, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Aesthetics.

Where the engineers have shown much curiousity towards the relative autonomy and even emotional interiors (Bogost's simulation fever) of the player, educators are looking at epistemic games like accountants (Learning as accounting and calculating is also an Episteme-Techne at work about work).

Evaluating Learning beyond Pragmatic Utilitarianism and Darwinist Development

The Administration of Today's Universities: Sites of Conformity, Incarceration & the Marketing of Rigidity as Flexibility

Modding has become quite a huge area for hardcore gamers. But they will not find any avenue for modding in universities. Along with many ironies from the so-called deregulations in universities, they are more regulated than ever.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/67d5/4fad4d33b5adccdcd3ac66d83b6fa00b8c24.pdf

http://bogost.com/writing/blog/people_are_more_important_than/

http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sicart

Graphic Source; https://keferrerblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/why-game-mechanics-are-important/