Khan Academy has Khanmigo. Duolingo replaced human contractors with AI-generated content, and its CEO declared that AI is “a better teacher than humans,” predicting that schools would survive mainly as childcare¹. Google has embedded Gemini chatbots into the Chromebooks distributed to public school children, sometimes without parental knowledge².

In 2024, Arizona State University President Michael Crow cited Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age as the inspiration for the university’s “Realm 5”: infinitely scalable education delivered through massively distributed, personalized, adaptive learning³.

That sent me back to the book to understand the vision. And as generative AI becomes more deeply embedded in our world, the vision is worth examining.

Subscribe now

The Dream Already Failed

So far, the track record is grim.

In 2019, E. Tammy Kim investigated Silicon Valley’s “personalized learning” reforms in Rhode Island schools. Tech-industry-funded programs had promised to revolutionize education through adaptive software and one-to-one Chromebook initiatives. What Kim found instead was overworked teachers embracing the reforms simply to secure basic resources, while critics warned that the model accelerated privatization and turned public schools into “big-data siphons”⁴.

By 2024, IBM’s $100 million Watson education project — once heralded as the future of AI tutoring — had become a cautionary tale; after five years, IBM conceded that its dazzling supercomputer made a lousy teacher⁵. That same year, the neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath argued in Harvard Business Review that more than forty years of research suggests generative AI could actually harm learning. Human understanding, he wrote, depends on empathy, the slow accumulation of knowledge, and sustained attention — exactly the things a tool that instantly supplies the right answer tends to short-circuit⁶.

Then came ChatGPT. By 2025, The Atlantic was reporting that students were using AI to generate essays and finish homework, sidestepping the intellectual struggle that once gave schoolwork its meaning⁷. A New York City public school senior, Ashanty Rosario, wrote a first-person account of watching her classmates outsource their thinking to AI, killing the “frantic productivity” that had once bonded them together⁸. By 2026, a viral AI agent called “Einstein” could complete a student’s coursework end to end — watching lectures, writing papers, taking quizzes — by logging into their Canvas account⁹.

The personalized learning dream had become a personalized cheating machine.

A Novel That Got There First

Stephenson’s Primer is nothing like these tools.

In The Diamond Age, the central technology is an interactive nanotech textbook called the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The book finds its way to Nell, a girl growing up in poverty in a future Shanghai. Although it was never meant for her, it teaches her language, logic, social graces, self-defense, and computation — all calibrated to her developmental stage and cultural context.

It is the ultimate personalized learning tool. And it works. Nell transforms from a neglected child into a resourceful, capable young woman. The Primer is, by any measure, the most effective educational technology ever devised.

On its surface, the novel looks like a triumph of the AI education dream. The technology delivers on every promise EdTech and AI companies are still making.

But we should not lose sight of why the Primer works.

The Human in the Machine

The Primer was built by the nanotech engineer John Hackworth. Every story it tells, every challenge it sets, every moment of scaffolded difficulty reflects a deliberate choice about what this particular child needs at this particular moment. As Gideon Dishon argues in a recent analysis of the novel, the Primer functions simultaneously as a personalized tutor and a vehicle for enculturation — transmitting specific cultural values and ways of being in the world¹⁰. Its cultural responsiveness is a design choice, not merely a feature spit out by an algorithm.

Cultural responsiveness, as a concept in education, was articulated by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995 — the same year Stephenson published the novel. Her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy held that effective teaching must account for the specific cultural context of each learner: students learn best when their backgrounds are treated as assets rather than obstacles, when the curriculum speaks to their lived experience, when the teacher understands who the student is beyond their test scores¹¹.

The Primer also works, given the current landscape of AI in education, because it makes Nell struggle. It does not hand her answers; it puts her in situations where she has to find them. It presents challenges calibrated to push her just past her current ability, then offers support when she is genuinely stuck. The personalization is not in the content delivery. It is in the timing of the struggle.

But the deepest reason the Primer works is also the easiest to miss: there is a person behind it. The book’s voice — the warmth that answers Nell, follows her, stays with her for years — is not generated. It is performed by Miranda, a human ractor hired to voice the Primer, who over thousands of hours comes to love the child she has never met. N. Katherine Hayles has argued that the Primer’s significance lies precisely in what it reveals about the boundary between human understanding and technological mediation¹²: the technology works when it is in dialogue with a human relationship, and falters when it operates alone. The thousands of identical Primers handed to the orphaned “mouse army” run on synthetic voices instead — and those girls, with the same hardware and the same lessons, do not become Nell.

The Quiet Argument

The Diamond Age does not reject the Primer. Nell benefits enormously from it. Her life is materially better because the technology exists.

But the novel never lets us forget what that technology rests on. Strip out Miranda and you do not get a lesser Primer; you get the mouse army’s Primer — the hardware and little else. Stephenson tucks his thesis into that contrast: the machine is a multiplier of human attention, not a replacement for it.

That is the part the current rush keeps getting backwards. The companies promising the Primer at scale are selling the one thing the novel insists cannot be scaled — Miranda herself — and stripping out, in the name of efficiency, the struggle and the relationship that did the actual teaching. The dream of adaptive learning was never really held back by a technical problem. Stephenson saw, thirty years ago, that it was a human one. We are only now finding out he was right.

Footnotes

1. “Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare.’” Fortune, May 20, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/05/20/duolingo-ai-teacher-schools-childcare/

2. Winter, Jessica. “What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?” The New Yorker, April 23, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/progress-report/what-will-it-take-to-get-ai-out-of-schools

3. Crow, Michael M. “Augmented Intelligence: Reimagining How the World Learns.” ASU+GSV Summit, 2024. https://asugsvsummit.com/video/augmented-intelligence-reimagining-how-the-world-learns

4. Kim, E. Tammy. “The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning.” The New Yorker, July 10, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-messy-reality-of-personalized-learning

5. Berdik, Chris. “AI Can’t Replace Teaching, but It Can Make It Better.” WIRED, July 10, 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/what-aspects-of-teaching-should-remain-human/

6. Horvath, Jared Cooney. “The Limits of GenAI Educators.” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2024. https://hbr.org/2024/07/the-limits-of-genai-educators

7. Shroff, Lila. “The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started.” The Atlantic, August 12, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-takeover-education-chatgpt/683840/

8. Rosario, Ashanty. “I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.” The Atlantic, September 3, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/high-school-student-ai-education/684088/

9. Shroff, Lila. “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?” The Atlantic, April 10, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2026/04/ai-agents-school-education/686754/

10. Dishon, Gideon. “AI based personalized learning in ‘The Diamond Age’: Artificial subversiveness and human feeling machines.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 57, no. 10, 2025, pp. 907–919. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2025.2494589

11. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 32, no. 3, 1995, pp. 465–491. DOI: 10.3102/00028312032003465

12. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Is Utopia Obsolete? Imploding Boundaries in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.” In World Weavers: Globalization, Science Fiction, and the Cybernetic Revolution, Hong Kong University Press, 2005, pp. 95–110. DOI: 10.1515/9789882203129-008

Finn Agler is the blogging pen name of R.G. Luchmun, a cultural anthropologist writing science fiction about first contact, time travel, and the places where cultures collide. Follow along for more intersections of anthropology and speculative fiction.

Now, this blog post is not a full review of Otherworldly but rather a chance for me to nerd out about the anthropology of food and the kinds of details that I love when I read science-fiction.

There is a lot to love about the premise of the book: a Caribbean space program with everything to prove, a mysterious ninth planet, and the dismal discovery that we are alone in the universe (I don’t think these are major spoilers — they all occur very early on in the book).

I was drawn to this premise because I, too, am from a small island nation, although not the Caribbean. I am used to my country just not evolving on the same stage as the big world powers, and I can see how it has shaped me.

But the thing that I appreciated most was Worrell’s attention to detail when it came to food. From the packed MREs to the small allotment of comfort foods allowed each crew member, Caribbean cuisine and treats shine: cou-cou and flying fish, chicken roti, sweet bread, sugar cakes.

Makes sense to me. What we eat, how we eat it, when we eat it, and who we eat it with are strongly linked to culture and identity. This is what foodways scholarship has always understood, and what Otherworldly does well: food is not simply fuel. It is culture made portable.

Portable culture

The cuisines of Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica are not ancient, monolithic traditions rooted in a single soil. They begin with the islands’ Indigenous peoples — the Taíno, the Kalinago — whose foodways were already in place when Europeans arrived: cassava domesticated and patiently detoxified, maize, peppers, allspice, and the technique of slow-smoking meat over a wooden frame the Taíno called barbacoa.^[1] Onto that foundation came centuries of forced and unfree convergence: West Africans who brought okra and the pounded-starch cooking that became cou-cou, indentured Indians who brought curry and roti, Chinese migrants who contributed noodles and stir-fry, European colonizers who brought their own provisions and a plantation economy that ran on sugar.^[2] A few ingredients were here already; most arrived with someone, carried across an ocean. Caribbean cuisine is born of this layering — of conquest, displacement, and adaptation — maintained through the insistence that the flavors of home survive even when home itself has been violently remade.

The food traditions that traveled from around the world to coalesce in the Caribbean, adding to the existing ones? That’s portable culture.

So when Worrell’s crew members fill their personal allowances for a three-year journey to the edge of the solar system with all the foods that personally remind them of home, they’re continuing a long human tradition.

The MRE and the sweetbread

Here’s a quote from the book: “The meals ready-to-eat, MREs, came in a variety of flavors: cou-cou and flying fish, shepherd’s pie, dandan noodles, and chicken roti, among others. The calcium, iron, and all the vitamin ABCs were hidden between their spices. The crew was also allotted a small compartment for “comfort foods.” Cleo had loaded her space with desserts: sweetbread, sugar cakes, and turnovers.”^[3]

Read that list again. Cou-cou and flying fish — a Bajan staple, the cornmeal-and-okra dish that anchors Barbadian home cooking. Chicken roti — the Indo-Caribbean wrap that arrived with indentured laborers and became Caribbean. Dandan noodles — Chinese. Shepherd’s pie — colonial British. These are not random menu items. They are the entire history of Caribbean migration compressed into an MRE pouch. Every crew member who opens one of these meals is eating the story of how people from multiple continents ended up on the same small islands, and how their descendants ended up on a spacecraft.

And then there are Cleo’s desserts. Sweetbread, sugar cakes, turnovers — the comfort foods she loads into her personal compartment. These are the foods she reaches for when things go wrong, the ones that boost her mood and keep her going. Sidney Mintz spent a career tracing how sugar reshaped the world — how the Caribbean’s plantation economy made sugar cheap and ubiquitous, and how that cheapness made sweetness central to working-class diets across the industrializing West.^[4] Cleo’s sugar cakes are the distant echo of that history. The same commodity that was extracted from Caribbean labor now returns, in transformed form, as emotional sustenance.

Foodways scholars have long understood that food becomes most legible as cultural identity precisely when it is disrupted — when migration forces you to choose what to carry and what to leave behind.^[5] In orbit, with Earth shrinking behind the crew, those choices become existential. These aren’t comforts in the ordinary sense. They’re proof that you come from somewhere specific. That you belong to a people. That the vastness of space hasn’t dissolved you into a generic astronaut.

What Otherworldly offers

Science fiction has been carrying food across space for a long time, and usually for exactly this reason. Ursula K. Le Guin — the daughter of an anthropologist, and it shows — made food carry the whole moral argument of The Dispossessed: the lean communal refectories of anarchist Anarres set against the rich, excessive tables of capitalist Urras, ideology you could taste. Even Star Trek, for all its replicator-enabled post-scarcity, still gave us Sisko’s father refusing to give up a real kitchen in New Orleans, as if a civilization that can synthesize any meal still needs someone to cook gumbo by hand.

The genre returns to food because food is simultaneously worldbuilding and kinship, memory, and economy.

What Otherworldly does that feels fresh is narrow the aperture. It treats a regional, creolized, historically particular cuisine as worth preserving across light-years — and the specificity is the entire point.

Of course, Otherworldly isn’t about food. If you’ve read it, you might be surprised that I wanted to write a whole blog post about something that is not a focal point of the book, but rather something that simply adds flavor (ha!) to the characters’ experiences. The journey is long, the crew is small, and the planet they arrive at is hostile in ways that have nothing to do with cuisine. The food brought from home exists in tension with all of this: a small, specific comfort in a landscape that is aggressively, fundamentally alien.

But here’s what the novel understands, and what food scholars have documented for decades: the act of carrying food into the unknown is never just about eating. David Sutton’s work on food and memory argues that taste and smell are the senses most directly tied to autobiographical memory — that a specific flavor can collapse time and distance, placing you back in a kitchen you left years ago.^[6] When Cleo reaches for a sugar cake in the middle of a crisis on an alien world, she isn’t just feeding herself. She’s performing an act of cultural continuity. She’s saying: I remember where I’m from. I remember who I am.

For readers who grew up watching their grandparents refuse to travel without their own provisions — the seasoning, the hot sauce, the thing nobody else would think to pack — Otherworldly is a mirror held up to something they always understood but rarely saw on a page. For readers who’ve never thought about food as a cultural technology, it’s an education. And for anyone who has ever wondered what it would mean to carry a civilization’s worth of culinary knowledge to another planet, Worrell gives you Caribbean astronauts doing exactly that — not because they were tasked with preserving culture, but because culture is what you bring when everything else is uncertain.

That’s the best thing a novel can do. It takes a pattern that has been running through human history for centuries — the movement of peoples and the food that moves with them — and extends it, just a little further, to the stars.

Otherworldly by Dwain Worrell
47North (Amazon Publishing), 2026

1. On Indigenous Caribbean foodways — including the Taíno cultivation and detoxification of bitter cassava — see B.W. Higman, Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture (University of the West Indies Press, 2008).↩︎

2. For a comprehensive overview of Caribbean food cultures as products of colonial displacement, indenture, and creolization, see Hanna Garth, ed., Food and Identity in the Caribbean (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). On the role of Indian indentured labor in shaping Caribbean foodways, see N. Jayaram, From Indians in Trinidad to Indo-Trinidadians: The Making of a Girmitiya Diaspora (Springer, 2022).↩︎

3. This passage is from Otherworldly by Dwain Worrell (47North, 2026).↩︎

4. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1985).↩︎

5. Jennifer Sweeney Tookes, “’The food represents’: Barbadian foodways in the diaspora,” Appetite 90 (2015): 65–73.↩︎

6. David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001).↩︎

Finn Agler is the blogging pen name of R.G. Luchmun, a cultural anthropologist writing science fiction about first contact, time travel, and the places where cultures collide. Follow along for more intersections of anthropology and speculative fiction.

I’m an anthropologist. I use social science to help me understand the world, but sometimes I need sci-fi. Here’s why.

Sci-Fi as Truth-Teller

Science fiction excels at showing us truths we need to see. It’s the genre of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin, 1979) and “defamiliarization” (Jameson, 1982), which means (in a simplified nutshell) that it takes the world as it is and makes it strange enough to perceive what we can’t otherwise notice.

In Pluribus, Carol is literally the last individual on Earth since everyone else has been absorbed into a collective. She is, by definition, the loneliest person who has ever lived. In Murderbot, the protagonist’s deepest desire is to be left alone with its media feeds and opt out of connection. In Severance, the entire premise is that you’ve been severed from yourself, and isn’t the loneliest relationship possible the one between you and the person you were before clock-in?

Project Hail Mary puts a man alone on a spaceship with no memory of why he’s there. His only companion is an alien he can’t initially communicate with. It is, at its core, about two lonely beings learning to be less lonely together.

So yes, we are lonely. And beyond the lived experiences that Templeton describes so poignantly in the Reactor piece, we have evidence that loneliness isn’t just individual.

Society and Loneliness

The Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness made it official: loneliness is a societal problem. An epidemic. When Vivek Murthy issued that advisory in 2023, the signal it sent was: this is a crisis that threatens public health.

But the loneliness epidemic didn’t start with Twitter or Facebook, although social media has not helped anything.

Robert Putnam saw it coming in 2000. Bowling Alone, his landmark study of America’s collapsing social capital, documented the slow death of the institutions that used to hold people together. Community groups. Religious organizations. The PTA. The lodge. The bowling league. All of it, quietly, steadily dissolving. Putnam called it a fifty-year trend. We’re now twenty-five years past his book, and the trend hasn’t reversed.

Zygmunt Bauman, also in 2000, had a name for what came next: liquid modernity. In a liquid world, relationships are temporary, identities are unstable, and belonging is something you rent rather than own. You don’t join a community. You join a Discord server where you may only know a fraction of the people behind the usernames, if any. You don’t know your neighbors. The structures that used to provide stability have been replaced by systems that provide convenience, and all these little things compound to systemic loneliness.

What Sci-Fi Offers That Scholars Can’t

It’s hard to write about the collapse of social capital in a way that captures the imagination, but you can write about a woman who is the last individual on Earth, and suddenly the reader feels what it means to be disconnected from the collective.

Scholars write about anomie (Durkheim, 1897). They write about liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000). They write about collapsing social capital (Putnam, 2000). And yes, this work is invaluable. I’m not here to push back on the value of the social sciences.

But scholars don’t always offer hope.

Science fiction can.

In a sci-fi story, you’re not reading about loneliness because scholars tell you it exists. You’re experiencing it. You’re on a spaceship with someone who speaks another language. You’re watching a screen while everyone else lives it. You’re the alien who is the only one who understands the human heart. And in that experience, you’re not just observing loneliness. You’re feeling it. You’re feeling with the character.

And that’s where hope lives.

Because in the stories we love, even when it’s about isolation, we see the value of connection, and the lengths the protagonists go to to connect. These aren’t just stories about loneliness being terrible. They’re stories about how humans (and post-humans, and aliens, of course) figure out ways to connect anyway.

Scholars diagnose the disease. Science fiction shows us that we can survive it — and sometimes, even thrive.

What It Means

So when Molly Templeton writes about loneliness in sci-fi, she’s right. What the genre is doing right now is holding up a mirror and saying: this is what it feels like. And millions of readers (and viewers) are looking into it and recognizing themselves.

But here’s the difference: in the stories we read, people figure it out. They find ways to connect. They find ways to be less lonely. The question is what we’re going to do about it now that we can see it so clearly — and the stories tell us we can.

Finn Agler is the blogging pen name of R.G. Luchmun, a cultural anthropologist writing science fiction about first contact, time travel, and the places where cultures collide. Follow along for more intersections of anthropology and speculative fiction.

Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press.

Durkheim, Émile (1897). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Presses universitaires de France.

Murthy, Vivek H. (2023). “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Social Connection, Loneliness, and Isolation.” The U.S. Surgeon General.

Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.

Suvin, Darko (1979). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press.