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Core Memory · 5 min · Oct 28, 2026
Education tools should start with teachers’ real needs
Neal Stephenson says education tech should respond to the problems teachers actually face, not the promise of a magic learning device.
The episode’s best minutes
Full episode- 17:25Uncertainty can make an AI arms race hard to pause6 min
- 1:27:14Education tools should start with teachers’ real needs5 min
- 1:20:32Unproven launch systems struggle to insure payloads2 min
- 5 more moments in the full episode
“I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want.”
Takeaways
- Teachers’ day-to-day problems should guide education technology.
- Past ed-tech initiatives often missed the needs of classrooms.
- A tool that helps gifted kids may not help students broadly.
About this segment
Neal Stephenson says education tech should respond to the problems teachers actually face, not the promise of a magic learning device. Gifted self-starters may thrive anyway; helping everyone is the harder test.
Neal Stephenson is author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and D: Heavy Water.
Author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age who coined 'metaverse' and co-founded Lamina1, an open-metaverse blockchain.
Ashlee Vance, Host · CEO, Core Memory
Wrote the best-selling biography Elon Musk; covered tech for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and The New York Times.
From “Neal Stephenson On AI And What Comes Next”, Oct 28, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 1:27:17
had to answer this question before. The screens kind of hits on another thing that came up about six or seven times, which is, can we now make the young lady's illustrated primer? Should we be doing that can we should we are you yeah so this this is now as should we describe what it is yeah it's a it's a uh hypothetical device a nanotech sort of magic book in my book the diamond age that uh it teaches kids um that just it's an educational system um and um the um so this is now hot in In a way that the metaverse was like five or six years ago. So I hear about it every day. I've been thinking about it a lot, I guess is the first thing to say. I'm actively thinking about this stuff.
- 1:28:19
Um, what I, uh, have been doing is, um, I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want. So, like, I follow the teacher's subreddit and, you know, a bunch of other channels of information, uh, 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. strategy okay i mean that that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want so um so i you know i think it's fine to to think about ed tech but i think it's really important to go about it in a way that um is uh is observant of the fact that there have been many ed tech initiatives, you know, down through the years, uh, that haven't worked out, um, and that don't, uh, address the, um, the, the pressing issues, um, that teachers actually have to, to deal with
- 1:29:22
day to day. And this is all meant to be direct 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 clod as his guide he'd never built a hardware system before and we were hanging out in his little san francisco apartment and he had like seven different ai systems running at the same time and you know he was speaking into one of them yeah he was he was like sending in all the receipts from amazon that he had bought for this fuser thing getting his diagrams back and it was he had this like fluidity with the computer that i i mean i i'm even though i'm on the older side now i i'm like pretty good i use all the yeah ladies of greatest tech i go pretty deep he had like a different relationship with
- 1:30:14
his computer it wasn't like exactly a tutor but it was like this symbiotic sort of thing going on that i did not have and i so so one of the questions like the the first question that comes up when you seriously start talking about this is, okay, we don't want to just make a gadget that is going to serve a small privileged population that doesn't need it because they're going to be fine anyway. No, we should make something that's going to work for everyone, that's going to have broad social impact.
- 1:30:53
And then, so once you go down that road, which is very feel good, Um, and again, start looking at the real problems of education. Then very soon you sort of focus back down to, okay, you know, let's, let's try a pilot program for a few, you know, kids. And those, um, so the, the, the kid that you're describing, I, I would put it to you, you know, would have been, um, just as successful a hundred years ago.
- 1:31:27
My analogy for this is Abe Lincoln. So when Abe Lincoln was a kid, he didn't have paper. So he had a shovel. So he would stick the shovel in the fire, and so it was covered with soot. And then he would flip it over, wait for it to cool down, and then he would scratch his lessons out on the shovel by scratching the soot off. And then when the shovel was full of words, he would stick it back into fire again.
- 1:32:00
Abraham Lincoln kids, you know, who just cannot be stopped, you know, no matter how rugged their circumstances might be, but they don't need help. So I'm not saying I have the answer. I'm just saying that these are the immediate questions you have to start thinking about when you begin to ponder, you know, bringing out a new kind of ed tech.