Teaching without Teachers? Automation, Education, and the Edge of the Human

Abstract

This article explores the possibility and plausibility of fully automating teaching within the structural dynamics of accelerated capitalism. Departing from normative or ethical debates about whether automation in education is desirable, it advances a theoretical hypothesis termed strong techno-automatism, grounded in two main claims. First, drawing on the Church–Turing thesis, it posits that the cognitive and metacognitive functions involved in teaching can, in principle, be formalized and executed by computational systems, without replicating human consciousness or subjective experience. Second, it argues that such automation does not require pedagogical policy as a driving force, but rather emerges as an endogenous trajectory of capitalist acceleration, which systematically replaces human labor with more efficient machinic couplings. The paper reframes teaching not as a transcendent human act but as an evolutionarily adaptive, socially mediated, and historically technologized function, whose progressive exteriorization enables its technical abstraction and potential computability. While acknowledging current technological, symbolic, and biopolitical obstacles to full automation -such as emotional labor, institutional inertia, and the custodial role of schooling- the article contends that none of these constitutes a definitive ontological barrier. In dialogue with postdigital and posthumanist thought, the analysis suggests that teaching is undergoing a material reconfiguration: from a subject-centered, embodied activity to a distributed architecture of learning operations involving both human and non-human agents. The question is no longer whether machines can teach better than humans, but how education will be reorganized once it no longer depends entirely on human agency