Benjamin Riley
@benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to helping people understand human cognition and generative AI. Advocate for humans.
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AI Will Not Revolutionize Education
YouTube video by Cognitive Resonance
www.youtube.com
In April 2025 I delivered a speech at the ASU+GSV ed-tech conference titled "AI Will Not Revolutionize Education." It touches on human cognition, gen AI, and the nature of scientific and social revolutions. I worked hard at this, I hope you'll watch and share.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0_t...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0_t...
Although not the central point of this essay on Watson, this is worth bearing in mind:
"We are scarcely closer to understanding the genetics of human intelligence than we were in the 1950s, and are perhaps even further away from a consensus definition of what sort of thing 'intelligence' even is."
"We are scarcely closer to understanding the genetics of human intelligence than we were in the 1950s, and are perhaps even further away from a consensus definition of what sort of thing 'intelligence' even is."
November 10, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Although not the central point of this essay on Watson, this is worth bearing in mind:
"We are scarcely closer to understanding the genetics of human intelligence than we were in the 1950s, and are perhaps even further away from a consensus definition of what sort of thing 'intelligence' even is."
"We are scarcely closer to understanding the genetics of human intelligence than we were in the 1950s, and are perhaps even further away from a consensus definition of what sort of thing 'intelligence' even is."
"It makes perfect sense to me that the Senate Democrats caved last night and voted to end the government shutdown with only the vaguest of promises from Senate Republicans: I am a lifelong Washington Wizards fan. I am accustomed to watching my team throw away a lead."
(Laughing but also weeping.)
(Laughing but also weeping.)
I scribbled down all my shutdown-related intrusive thoughts and put them in a blog post.
open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...
open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...
The Shutdown Surrender
I just... I mean... Whatever.
open.substack.com
November 10, 2025 at 5:36 PM
"It makes perfect sense to me that the Senate Democrats caved last night and voted to end the government shutdown with only the vaguest of promises from Senate Republicans: I am a lifelong Washington Wizards fan. I am accustomed to watching my team throw away a lead."
(Laughing but also weeping.)
(Laughing but also weeping.)
"The only thing we can do regarding the forthcoming bursting of the AI bubble is…pray? Are we so helpless in the face of our tech overlords that we must hope for the Almighty to save us, rather than, say, enacting some regulations and employing some critical thinking?"
Thou shalt not falsify the AI bubble
Serenity now, serenity now
buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com
November 10, 2025 at 12:36 PM
"The only thing we can do regarding the forthcoming bursting of the AI bubble is…pray? Are we so helpless in the face of our tech overlords that we must hope for the Almighty to save us, rather than, say, enacting some regulations and employing some critical thinking?"
Cool. I tend to seek more rigorous evidence of effectiveness than personal anecdote.
I have personally found chatbots to be *amazingly* effective tutors. I feed it a pdf and prompt it to ask first easy questions, then progressively harder ones, tying in other concepts from other chats in the project. Domains: Statistics, software languages, hugging face AI papers.
The evidence AI tutors work "astonishing well" is incredibly thin. We've seen these same promises made for virtually every technological "innovation" of the past 100 years. (Carl's essay is more nuanced than this post describing it.)
November 9, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Cool. I tend to seek more rigorous evidence of effectiveness than personal anecdote.
This is so shameful.
1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️
November 9, 2025 at 3:44 PM
This is so shameful.
Guillermo del Toro, he who leads crowds in chants of "Fuck AI!", narrates a scene from his recently released Frankenstein. There is a profound viscerality to del Toro's work, and in this movie too -- human bodies are opened up (and recombined) as blood flows freely.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/m...
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/m...
Watch Oscar Isaac Create Life in ‘Frankenstein’
www.nytimes.com
November 9, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Guillermo del Toro, he who leads crowds in chants of "Fuck AI!", narrates a scene from his recently released Frankenstein. There is a profound viscerality to del Toro's work, and in this movie too -- human bodies are opened up (and recombined) as blood flows freely.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/m...
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/m...
The argument that human feelings are entirely the result of cultural programming is, uh, ambitious. Think of pain, it is pre-lingual, and "unlike any other state of consciousness, pain has no referential content, it resists objectification in language." (E. Scarry)
AI cannot feel pain.
AI cannot feel pain.
In @nytopinion.nytimes.com
“A.I. is no less a form of intelligence than digital photography is a form of photography,” the philosopher Barbara Gail Montero writes in a guest essay. “And now A.I. is on its way to doing something even more remarkable: becoming conscious.”
“A.I. is no less a form of intelligence than digital photography is a form of photography,” the philosopher Barbara Gail Montero writes in a guest essay. “And now A.I. is on its way to doing something even more remarkable: becoming conscious.”
Opinion | A.I. Is Already Intelligent. This Is How It Becomes Conscious.
Skeptics overlook how our concepts change.
nyti.ms
November 9, 2025 at 10:41 AM
The argument that human feelings are entirely the result of cultural programming is, uh, ambitious. Think of pain, it is pre-lingual, and "unlike any other state of consciousness, pain has no referential content, it resists objectification in language." (E. Scarry)
AI cannot feel pain.
AI cannot feel pain.
The evidence AI tutors work "astonishing well" is incredibly thin. We've seen these same promises made for virtually every technological "innovation" of the past 100 years. (Carl's essay is more nuanced than this post describing it.)
Latest post looks at the complicated picture emerging on AI tutoring: when AI tutors work astonishingly well and when they quietly make students worse. ⬇️
Are we approaching a Turing Test for Teaching? A deep dive into the evidence on AI tutoring. carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-algori...
November 8, 2025 at 9:17 PM
The evidence AI tutors work "astonishing well" is incredibly thin. We've seen these same promises made for virtually every technological "innovation" of the past 100 years. (Carl's essay is more nuanced than this post describing it.)
It's worth watching the 1997 film Gattaca to get a window into the concerns about what sequencing the genome might portend. One of the happier scientific developments is realizing just how complex the relationship is btw nature and nurture, in ways that undercut Watson's "scientific" racism.
I wrote some reflections this afternoon about how the discovery of the double helix changed the course of science. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qPS3y6
November 8, 2025 at 2:46 PM
It's worth watching the 1997 film Gattaca to get a window into the concerns about what sequencing the genome might portend. One of the happier scientific developments is realizing just how complex the relationship is btw nature and nurture, in ways that undercut Watson's "scientific" racism.
Few people realize that AI is actually a cat in a box that is both alive and dead at the same time.
AI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points
November 7, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Few people realize that AI is actually a cat in a box that is both alive and dead at the same time.
"Once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.”
Librarians are at the front lines of the war on knowledge. They speak out here.
Librarians are at the front lines of the war on knowledge. They speak out here.
“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
November 7, 2025 at 11:55 AM
"Once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.”
Librarians are at the front lines of the war on knowledge. They speak out here.
Librarians are at the front lines of the war on knowledge. They speak out here.
This is nightmare fuel for those struggling with their mental health, especially children.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
November 7, 2025 at 2:11 AM
This is nightmare fuel for those struggling with their mental health, especially children.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
Perhaps we could also measure the size of human craniums. Perhaps we could craft an entire "science" around this endeavor.
bro are you fucking kidding me
November 6, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Perhaps we could also measure the size of human craniums. Perhaps we could craft an entire "science" around this endeavor.
I have tremendous respect for Yoshua Bengio, but this simply isn't true. One conceptual reason we might doubt that AI will become capable of doing what humans can do is that there's no path to these tools inventing new metaphors, as we humans do. (See link below for more on this)
November 6, 2025 at 8:02 PM
I have tremendous respect for Yoshua Bengio, but this simply isn't true. One conceptual reason we might doubt that AI will become capable of doing what humans can do is that there's no path to these tools inventing new metaphors, as we humans do. (See link below for more on this)
"On a day-to-day basis I have conversations with theologians who think, 'OK, that's wildly ambitious for humans to try to create a new form of digital sentience of unknown power. And then you talk to the AI People and they are like, 'You say I have a God complex? I am God."
"move fast and break things" applied to the scientific method.
"On a day-to-day basis we have conversations with biologists who think, 'OK, that's wildly ambitious to try to prevent and cure all diseases.' And then you talk to the AI people [and they ask] 'Why are you so unambitious?"
"On a day-to-day basis we have conversations with biologists who think, 'OK, that's wildly ambitious to try to prevent and cure all diseases.' And then you talk to the AI people [and they ask] 'Why are you so unambitious?"
Zuckerberg, Chan bet AI can cure all disease
The duo will pivot their philanthropy work to AI-powered biology.
www.axios.com
November 6, 2025 at 5:59 PM
"On a day-to-day basis I have conversations with theologians who think, 'OK, that's wildly ambitious for humans to try to create a new form of digital sentience of unknown power. And then you talk to the AI People and they are like, 'You say I have a God complex? I am God."
In my career in education I've long found students to be far more realistic about the impact of technology on their education than older adults. To students, the latest tech fad does not present as some radical transformation, it's just some thing they gotta deal with.
me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?
students: no AI
I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion
students: no AI
I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion
November 6, 2025 at 11:20 AM
In my career in education I've long found students to be far more realistic about the impact of technology on their education than older adults. To students, the latest tech fad does not present as some radical transformation, it's just some thing they gotta deal with.
How is this an overstatement? The CFO of OpenAI apparently said on the record that the US government may need to "backstop" the financing it seeks. That the company later walked this back is hardly exonerating -- if anything it should raise even more alarms.
I need accounts like this to actually link to the story they’re citing. If I have the right link, this strikes me as an overstatement.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
November 6, 2025 at 2:30 AM
How is this an overstatement? The CFO of OpenAI apparently said on the record that the US government may need to "backstop" the financing it seeks. That the company later walked this back is hardly exonerating -- if anything it should raise even more alarms.
"Many doomsday anxieties around AI likely reflect the broader epistemological shift away from language as a source of truth. The anxieties we place on them now reflect a deep unease and unfamiliarity with how we navigate a world where words persuade without regard to reality." - @eryk.bsky.social
Geoffrey Hinton warns us of the persuasive powers of superintelligence. But, "while AI won't “decide” to persuade people to do harmful things on a global scale any time soon; AI companies are persuading us to do harmful things on a global scale already." mail.cyberneticforests.com/thoughts-on-...
Thoughts on Hinton
On Consciousness in Programs
Geoffrey Hinton recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on backpropagation, a foundational piece of research that contributed to the emergence of contemporary artificial ...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
November 5, 2025 at 1:50 PM
"Many doomsday anxieties around AI likely reflect the broader epistemological shift away from language as a source of truth. The anxieties we place on them now reflect a deep unease and unfamiliarity with how we navigate a world where words persuade without regard to reality." - @eryk.bsky.social
This paragraph from Ben Thompson's Stratechery column today is simply *chef's kiss*. Sure, AI is being pursued by cult members in economically irrational ways that stifle the public interest, but gotta admire their chutzpah!
November 5, 2025 at 11:45 AM
This paragraph from Ben Thompson's Stratechery column today is simply *chef's kiss*. Sure, AI is being pursued by cult members in economically irrational ways that stifle the public interest, but gotta admire their chutzpah!
"Some folks boosting (or contributing to) the coming AI teaching assistant boom talk as if teachers will offload some cognitive labor to the machine, and that will be the end of it. It won’t be the end of it. The substitution of AI for human will affect and alter the results."
The Coming AI Teaching Assistant Boom (And Cheating) open.substack.com/pub/curmudgu... @mattbarnum.bsky.social
The Coming AI Teaching Assistant Boom (And Cheating)
Matt Barnum (who is, thank God, now at Chalkbeat) just made three predictions about AI in education, and one of them makes my head hurt.
open.substack.com
November 4, 2025 at 9:11 PM
"Some folks boosting (or contributing to) the coming AI teaching assistant boom talk as if teachers will offload some cognitive labor to the machine, and that will be the end of it. It won’t be the end of it. The substitution of AI for human will affect and alter the results."
15 years ago, "personalized learning" enthusiasts cited a small 1984 study of *human* tutoring as evidence that technology could improve student learning. Amazingly, OpenAI's idiot VP of Education cites the same study to support AI tutoring today. This is all so dumb. Via @mattbarnum.bsky.social:
3 ways AI will (and won’t) change schools
The cheating problem isn’t going away. More teachers will use AI as an assistant. But AI won't be a supertutor.
cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org
November 4, 2025 at 4:28 PM
15 years ago, "personalized learning" enthusiasts cited a small 1984 study of *human* tutoring as evidence that technology could improve student learning. Amazingly, OpenAI's idiot VP of Education cites the same study to support AI tutoring today. This is all so dumb. Via @mattbarnum.bsky.social:
Whooooooo-boy there is a LOT going on in this paragraph.
November 4, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Whooooooo-boy there is a LOT going on in this paragraph.
An excellent diagnosis of America's current crisis. Zimmer notes that the Administration aims to escalate the violence through paramilitary activity; what we are learning is that ridicule and humor are effective means of defusing that approach. Gotta embrace the frog costumes.
Where America stands, one year after the election.
A fascistic movement controls the government; they are building an authoritarian state; but they have not been able yet to extend authoritarian rule across society. A democracy no more, but not a consolidated autocratic regime yet.
New piece:
A fascistic movement controls the government; they are building an authoritarian state; but they have not been able yet to extend authoritarian rule across society. A democracy no more, but not a consolidated autocratic regime yet.
New piece:
Escalation, Authoritarian “Normalization,” or a Democratic Turnaround?
One year after the election: What we can say with certainty about the state of the Trumpist assault, where uncertainty lies, and where America might go from here
steady.page
November 4, 2025 at 3:07 PM
An excellent diagnosis of America's current crisis. Zimmer notes that the Administration aims to escalate the violence through paramilitary activity; what we are learning is that ridicule and humor are effective means of defusing that approach. Gotta embrace the frog costumes.
Periodically I feel the need to remind you how Big Tech companies are claiming their AI tools will be used versus the obvious reality.
November 4, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Periodically I feel the need to remind you how Big Tech companies are claiming their AI tools will be used versus the obvious reality.
Reposted by Benjamin Riley
“Please think about students using chatbots to ‘augment’ their learning and thereby becoming conditioned to expect that their interactions with their educators, whether human or digital, should start from a foundation of obsequiousness.” - @benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Sexbots, students, and schools
AI is warping our understanding of what public education is for
open.substack.com
November 4, 2025 at 9:05 AM
“Please think about students using chatbots to ‘augment’ their learning and thereby becoming conditioned to expect that their interactions with their educators, whether human or digital, should start from a foundation of obsequiousness.” - @benjaminjriley.bsky.social