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NS Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson Author of Snow Crash and other books.

“I follow the teachers' subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. Okay, I mean, that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want.”

Core Memory · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“I follow the teachers' subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. Okay, I mean, that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory

Context

Stephenson was asked about the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, the AI tutor from his novel The Diamond Age, which he says is now hot the way the metaverse once was. He is wary of edtech that ignores what teachers say they need.

Transcript

Core Memory
Ashlee Vance

we describe

Speaker 3

what it is?

Neal Stephenson

…that teaches kids that just it's an educational system. And the so this is now hot in a way that the metaverse was like five or six years ago. So I hear about it every day. I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot, I guess, is the first thing to say. You know, I'm actively thinking about this stuff. What I have been doing is I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want. So like I follow the teachers' subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. Okay, I mean, that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want. So I think it's fine to think about ed tech, but I think it's really important to go about it in a way that is observant of the fact that there have been many ed tech initiatives, you know, down through the years that haven't worked out and that don't address the pressing issues that teachers actually have to deal with day to day.

Speaker 3

And this is all meant to be directed to you. I'll say one thing. One of the most read stories I've done recently, I had this experience. I was with this 22-year-old and I was hanging out with him. He had built a nuclear fuser in his bedroom using only Claude as his guide. He'd never built a…

Neal Stephenson

So one of the questions, like the first question that comes up when you seriously start talking about this is, okay, you know, we don't want to just make a gadget that is going to serve a small privileged population, you know, that doesn't need it because they're going to be fine anyway. No, we…

Speaker 3

Okay. I'll leave you with this last one. I mean, I was going down this road before. There's just a million things. I mean, this must be so frustrating because people see you as some kind of oracle. I mean, talking to you has been different than I thought it would be in some ways. Like, I thought…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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