Ep. 10 - Tom Pantazes: The Great Flattening (Season Finale!)

For the finale of The Line_, Matthew and Sean sit down with the guest who'd been at the top of their list since the beginning: *Dr. Tom Pantazes*, educational developer at West Chester University and host of the _ODLI On Air podcast. Tom draws his first line along a familiar axis — personal versus professional. He uses AI for administrative and disciplinary work but sees little reason to bring it home (and won't pay for it himself). That opens the episode's central argument: is AI's value about efficiency — removing friction, making things quick and painless — or about *extension*, building on real expertise to go places you couldn't go alone? Sean makes the case for extension. Tom pushes back: isn't extension just another kind of efficiency? Isn't all technology efficiency improvement? They don't fully settle it, and that's the point. Along the way: Kieran Egan and Walter Ong on the gains and losses baked into every technology (yes, even pencils, even language); an economics professor using Claude Code to take students further than Word ever could; and the sharpest idea of the season — *the flattening*. As a predictive tool, AI is "the great averager." Tom's experiment having students quiz AI on games only they had mastered (the summary of one read like the back of the box) shows exactly what averaging leaves out. From there: why embodiment is the thing AI simply can't do — and why that question opens the door to what's next. In the debrief, Sean lands the line of the season: "Efficiency is an act of flattening. I don't want to live in a flat world." The conversation turns to Heidegger, Aristotle's four causes, and Sarah Ahmed's queer phenomenology — the dashboard as habitus, place shaping body and body shaping place — pointing directly toward the dissertation work ahead. Plus: what's next for PEXE. A new show on phenomenology as public pedagogy is coming this fall, with a possible Season Two of The Line in the winter. Find Dr. Tom Pantazes and https://open.spotify.com/show/7dlveEu...,   / tompantazes.bsky.socialand      / @thomaspantazes   And find the www.pexelab.orgThanks for listening!