Exactly. That refutation stuck with me all these years. I remember being very much inspired by the Primer and poking around with that idea. But the more I expl

Exactly. That refutation stuck with me all these years. I remember being very much inspired by the Primer and poking around with that idea. But the more I explore things like, Consciousness, awareness, or ideas like regenerative education, unschooled, or John Gatto Taylor's book ... that refutation gets louder and louder for me. It's easy to say, this is a work of fiction, that Stephenson did not have sufficient vision or technical prowess to pull it off. That somehow, LLMs will overcome the problems, and that we can truly have autonomous education ... that it seems unlikely that somehow, someone who was fully engaged with the nurturing of a child through reading lines given to her was somehow able to do what the AI alone could not. Still -- being present makes a huge difference.