Hunger, Power, and Education in the Algorithmic Age

Abstract

This article offers a critical pedagogical analysis of artificial intelligence in education by conceptualizing AI not as a neutral enhancement of learning, but as a reorganization of educational scarcity. Against dominant narratives that present AI as a solution to inequality, inefficiency, and lack of access, it argues that algorithmic educational systems often redistribute scarcity in less visible but more pervasive ways, producing informational abundance alongside ethical, political, and existential deprivation. Drawing on Freirean critical pedagogy, the article introduces hunger as a central analytical metaphor for examining education in the algorithmic age. Through a conceptual distinction between fasting, starvation, and death, it theorizes different forms of absence: fasting as a voluntary and pedagogically generative refusal of algorithmic immediacy; starvation as the imposed erosion of agency, voice, and context within datafied learning environments; and death as the foreclosure of education’s emancipatory horizon when prediction and optimization replace hope and transformation. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding how AI reshapes power, subjectivity, and educational possibility, and outlines the contours of a critical pedagogy of AI grounded in dialogue, agency, and educational justice.