Current attitudes toward generative AI hearken back to early skepticism about the impact of the internet on education. Both then and now, technology has created challenges but also opportunities that can't be ignored. In 1998, noted technology critic and historian of automation David Noble published his influential article "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education," in which he warned about the negative impacts the internet would have on education. His main concern was with the potential effects of "automation" on higher education, describing automation in the educational context as "the distribution of digitized course material online." Noble looked into the future and saw a commercial takeover of higher education in which "the new technology of education, like the automation of other industries, robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of livelihood."
