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Benjamin Riley

@benjaminjriley.bsky.social

6K followers 860 following 3.4K posts

Founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to helping people understand human cognition and generative AI. Advocate for humans.

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · May 9

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...

AI Will Not Revolutionize Education

YouTube video by Cognitive Resonance

www.youtube.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 56m

At the last major No Kings protest, I met two Black American veterans, both graduates of West Point. They were there, they told me, because they took an oath to serve the country and our Constitution, "to defend this," with "this" being the peaceful protest taking place.

Be there on October 18.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 9h

"What has leaked out into our politics, courtesy of oligarchic enablers like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, is the solipsism that has always characterised social media. The fantasy that you, and only you, are the one person that matters in the whole world; the player surrounded by NPCs."

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · Feb 1

keep coming back to this essay from @quinnae.com on how social media allows us to demand a world that reflects our id back at ourselves

sometimes that means power fantasies--but equally it can mean self-justifying frenzies of fear and terror

www.liberalcurrents.com/meta-mirror-...

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks! For the record, I'm not predicting OpenAI's downfall per se--see comment about Tesla. But I have no problem pointing out the absurdity of Altman's claims.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you! Not my regular beat but it was fun to write. While also worrying!

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 1d

Ok @davekarpf.bsky.social wins, I wrote about OpenAI and Enron again, with a nod to Lehman Brothers as well. The fire burns as AI bubbles.

buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/dont-stop-...

Don't Stop Believin' in OpenAI

Or it all may collapse

buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 1d

I've got bad news about your forthcoming 40s.

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

Dammit, I don't want to. Yet I also bookmarked this image for a reason...

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

I was thinking I might have to write about the broad consensus in the finance community that we are in a crazy AI bubble, but mercifully @davekarpf.bsky.social has it covered -- with a nod to my Enron analogy from 25 years ago (thanks Dave).

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 2d

Everyone agrees that we're currently in a dotcom era-like AI bubble. People disagree what sort of bubble it is.

There are 3 stories one can tell about the dotcom crash: a startup story, a telecom story, and an accounting fraud story.

My take: it's giving Enron
open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

It's Giving Enron

On the AI bubble, and the various echoes of the dotcom crash

open.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

This is encouraging. The philanthropic community has largely boosted and hyped AI without thinking about broader social consequences. The funders in this new group appear to be taking a more nuanced approach.

John Palfrey @palfrey.org · 2d

Humans created AI, and we can still shape its future. That is why @macfound joined a broad coalition of our peers to launch Humanity AI, a new initiative to keep people at the center of our AI future.

Learn more: humanityai.ai

Home - Humanity AI

Our future with AI can and will be what we make it. Humanity AI is uniting philanthropy in a broad […]

humanityai.ai

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

I am left weeping by this story. The inhumanity of it all. But it furthers my resolve to end American fascism. If you live in the US, please turn out on October 18.

www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

He supported the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Now he may be deported to the Taliban.

He supported America’s war, escaped Afghanistan and started a family in the U.S. Then ICE arrested him. If he is deported, he expects the Taliban to kill him.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

Those of us "on the left" are mostly worried about American fascism right now. I realize life has to go one to some degree but policy questions about "gifted" education ranks somewhere between 7,429th and 8,356th on my list of concerns.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

Pining for the fjords.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

I feel so seen. Been bitching about that movie since it came out.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2d

We're just stunned.

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 4d

Thanks! And that's a good way of putting it, though interestingly LLMs might be said to stay on the rails while behaving randomly.

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 4d

Excellent essay, Eryk. I'd go even further and say that cultural transformation arises when a human grows frustrated with the limitation of a current language (or vocabulary) and invokes new metaphors. I see no path for AI to do that.

open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

There is no Artificial Irony

Large-language models are dead-metaphor machines

open.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 4d

"Human language is motivated by the articulation of thought; machine language is crafted through structure....As a result, the likelihood of finding new arrangements of words through an LLM is determined not by the capacity of AI reason, but to shuffle the expectations of a word's proper position."

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 4d

I've been re-acquainting myself with NNs, transformers and LLMs this week, so these are early thoughts. But I am starting to think about language without the capacity to imagine language, i.e., an LLM unable to imagine itself participating in language. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-machine...

What Machines Don't Know

Imagining Language Without Imagination It's important to acknowledge that Large Language Models are complex. There's an oversimplified binary in online chatter between the dismissive characterizatio...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 5d

No F'ing Kings. October 18.

50501: The People’s Movement ❌👑 @50501movement.bsky.social · 5d

NoKings.org

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 6d

Always remember that the premise that the [printing press/Internet/whatever] democratized knowledge is historically suspect. A good essay to call upon whenever someone claims that "AI democratizes expertise," a ludicrous argument.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 6d

really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer

The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

sonjadrimmer.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 6d

A long-running debate in physics is whether quantum mechanics is describing something real, or should rather be thought of as a metaphorical abstraction. I think the same question applies to "intelligence," as I write about this week. buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/the-quantu...

The quantum of intelligence

What might a long-running debate in physics suggest about human cognition and AI?

buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 7d

Yes, it's a lazy argument invoked by people who never read what Plato actually contended. Hope my lil contribution to the debate helps you push back on it!

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 7d

Well first of all it was allegedly Plato, and you're right to be annoyed, as he wasn't against writing! I wrote an essay so I'd never have to deal with this dumb argument again. open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

Plato was an AI skeptic

(Maybe) But he definitely wasn't universally hostile to writing

open.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 8d

@seantrott.bsky.social has written insightful commentary on this. open.substack.com/pub/seantrot...

"Mechanistic interpretability" for LLMs, explained

Trying to peek inside the "black box".

open.substack.com

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 8d

It's remarkable both for the unhinged hallucination that "Antifa" is some sort of organized effort and the commitment to using extrajudicial killings as countermeasure. Fever dream on top of fever dream.

Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 8d

My gosh. After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly "carrying drugs," the US Attorney General says "Just like we did with cartels, we're going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa."

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 8d

"“We’re sort of counterfeiting the human experience at scale across several dimensions simultaneously and then putting that in the hands of children and hoping that works out. That’s a high-stakes gamble.” www.sfexaminer.com/news/technol...

Students raise alarms about AI use

Study connects schools’ adoption with concerns.

www.sfexaminer.com

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