Cox defines epistemic agents as “beings for whom knowledge is salient to their formation of beliefs, their dispositions, and their actions”, this agency entailing “a preference for knowledge and both the ability and the will to be guided by it” (2024, 16). By this very definition, neither managers nor inforgs are true epistemic agents. For managers, utility supersedes any preference for knowledge; a manager cannot (or at least, should not primarily) be guided by what they are supposed to manage. Inforgs, on the other hand, does not only make ‘personal knowledge’ archaic (27) but turns the very idea of agency as void. Activity as a dependent is not agency: one cannot develop a preference nor even a relationship of saliency to something that they are “entirely dependent on” (26). However, though Cox argues that only the Maker theory of epistemic agency holds water, we must look at the ‘disruptions’ in education caused by Generative AI as a result of technology creating contentious other theories (15).
I think Cox’s working concepts of epistemic agency and knowledge are sufficient, even without bringing up the question of what knowledge is and other epistemological concerns. Yet a gap I cannot seem to close with Cox’s thesis is the very idea of education itself: if the goal of education is knowledge and he argues that to know is to make, then why is there much concern about the tools rather than the making? Cox is hardly alone in this sentiment: Vergara’s paper is largely centred on how education can respond to Generative AI, even beginning as its first research question how the curricula could “be revised to effectively addressed the challenges and opportunities presented by Generative AI” (2025, 1).
Two questions. One: by what means are we associating the ‘disruptions’ with GenAI’s influence on education? Here, I second the Floridian’s solution to the inforg’s dystopia: “to develop the ability to question the data universe skillfully and critically to draw useful information from it” (Cox 2024, 27). I think this would require something of a step back from the framework in which technologies such as GenAI are seen as all-encompassing so as to understand that there is (probably) much more to knowledge/epistemic agency/education/life itself. (There might also be more to technology and knowledge than just these disruptions. In the first place, who are making these claims about the capacities of GenAI, for example? What are at stake for them?).
That is not to say that technologies such as GenAI are irrelevant to education. On the contrary, I believe they are poignant representations of the contemporary environments that we are all within—spaces where tensions of both utility and dangers, creativity and meaninglessness, survival and lifelessness, abound. Hence I would argue that rather than being disruptive, they are symptomatic of illnesses that had been largely ignored, especially in education. Further, if education is supposed to be prophylactic, then we might even view GenAI as a kind of inoculation.
The second question is inspired directly by Cox’s “Does the new infosphere create the conditions in which there can be knowledge without knowers?” (27). I think more simply, we can ask whether knowledge completely devoid of knowers is really of significance. Imagine Floridi’s dystopia: can we truly consider that as [human] life still?
My own biases tell me that humans are more disruptive than technologies. After all, they are all borne out of the former’s making. Hence, I do not think that such a disruptive species will be able to sustain a lifeless inforg existence, in the very same way that technology cannot on its own make a biological life as inconclusive as human beings [Searle (1991) makes the same point, I believe] and one is more fundamental than the other.
References
Cox, G. M. (2024). Artificial Intelligence and the Aims of Education: Makers, Managers, or Inforgs? Studies in Philosophy and Education, 43 (1), 15-30. https://doi.org.10.100/s1121-023-09907-2.
Vergara, J.P.C. (2025). Navigating the Generative Artificial Intelligence Era: Charting the Course for Curricular Reform in Higher Education in the Philippines. EDCOM 2. https://edcom2.gov.ph/publications/navigating-the-generative-artificial-intelligence-era-charting-the-course-for-curricular-reform-in-higher-education-in-the-philippines/