A tecnologia nas teses sobre educação e inteligências artificiais: disputa entre capital e trabalho

Abstract

This research is linked to the Educational Theories and Pedagogical Practices research line of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Goiás (IFG). Its objective is to explain how technology is approached in academic literature concerning artificial intelligence within stricto sensu graduate programs in education in Brazil. To achieve the proposed objective, we conducted bibliographical research, specifically a state-of-the-knowledge study, which allows for a review of academic production and its trends (Romanoviski; Ens, 2006; Moraes, 2016; Malaquias, 2018). Regarding the method, we are guided by the foundations of historical-dialectical materialism, which directs the investigation of the phenomenon to apprehend its movement through mediation, contradiction, and historicity (Kopnin, 1978; Kosik, 2010; Marx, 2011, 2013; Marx; Engels, 1998; Paulo Netto, 2011). In the exercise of understanding the apparent and its multiple determinations, the corpus was systematized based on a survey of academic publications in the Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) database. Following the application of inclusion criteria and floating reading, this resulted in 13 theses from the period between 2020 and 2024. The corpus analysis relies on Feenberg (2002, 2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2025), who proposes four approaches to technology; Peixoto (2012, 2015, 2016, 2022, 2023), who studies the relationship between education and technology by proposing a dialectical conception; and Vieira Pinto (2005), who studies how distinct technological approaches serve technocratic interests and relations of submission between countries. Regarding the problematization of artificial intelligence, we rely on Crawford (2022), Moore (2019), Morozov (2018), Pasquinelli (2021, 2023), Silveira (2021a, 2021b, 2023, 2024, 2025), and Zuboff (2020). The investigative path started from the description of the immediate – the technical definitions of artificial intelligence – to reach, through successive approximations, the most essential determinations of the phenomenon. In the corpus analysis, we identified the hegemony of a technocentric perspective, which oscillates between instrumental and deterministic approaches, to the detriment of a dialectical understanding that considers the contradictions and historicity of the relationship between education and technology. Deepening the analysis, we unveiled fundamental determinations that the appearance of the phenomenon tends to conceal: surplus-value extraction, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, the platformization of education, and the precarization of teachers’ labour, all of which are expressions, within the educational field, of the fundamental contradiction between capital and labor. As a synthesis of the movement of thought, we concluded that overcoming the technocentric approach requires not only an epistemological critique but also the recognition of class struggle as a central category to understand and transform the relations between education and artificial intelligence, pointing to the need for counter-hegemonic pedagogical projects committed to the socialization of the means of production and to human formation.