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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benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
I've got bad news about your forthcoming 40s.
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Dammit, I don't want to. Yet I also bookmarked this image for a reason...
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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).
davekarpf.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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.
palfrey.org
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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.
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
I feel so seen. Been bitching about that movie since it came out.
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Thanks! And that's a good way of putting it, though interestingly LLMs might be said to stay on the rails while behaving randomly.
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
"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.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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!
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
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.
premthakker.bsky.social
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."
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
"“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
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
This is very interesting. And points to an interesting and productive use of LLMs for certain forms of modeling social behavior.
jenlucpiquant.bsky.social
This Atlantic analysis echoes the long convo I had recently with a European researcher who maintains that social media cannot be fixed because the problem lies in its very infrastructure and human nature cannot deal with it. I increasingly think he is correct. arstechnica.com/science/2025...
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
If someone who was interested in QM and the CI and wanted to learn more about Bohr's views specifically, what might you recommend reading? (This someone is a layman who skips over the complex math equations.)
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
This is what's so remarkable (for me, infuriating) about boosting AI usage in schools. We are *already* seeing modern society straining under the corrosive effects of social media -- now we want to push related technology down into our schools? A long-term recipe for disaster.
mims.bsky.social
Humans evolved a cognitive 'social proof' system for establishing what's true (if enough of the people around me believe something, I'll go along) and media fragmentation + social media has completely and totally hijacked it

Feels like AI will only make this worse
lordbusinessman.bsky.social
"no in the future people will cryptographically verify what's true and-" no they will not. People are fucking stupid.
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Bryan Stevenson is such a remarkable and admirable American. One wonders what might happen if he ran for high office. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/u...
Civil Rights Lawyer Bryan Stevenson on How America’s Story Should Be Told
www.nytimes.com
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
I'm finding it surreal that there's broad agreement in the finance community that we are in an AI bubble. Even unapologetic boosters such as Ben Thompson of Stratechery are like, yep, obviously in a bubble. Given that much of the global economy is being propped up by AI, this should be worrying!