AI in Education Meetup #7
Hyperstiton: Hacking Creativity and LLMs in Education
The conversation around AI in education is stuck in a loop of fear and loss. Cognitive offloading is framed as a crisis. But what if the real story is about creative possibility?
Join Rachel Horst for a 20-minute talk exploring hyperstiton, the narratives shaping how we think about AI and learning, and what happens when we flip the script. Followed by an open group discussion.
6:30: Doors open
7:00: We start (right on time!)
8:00: Event wraps up; mingling & conversation
8:30: Doors close
Location: Ethos Lab, 177 E 3rd Ave, Vancouver, BC
Ring the doorbell at Ethọ́s Lab for entry.
Every week, a new headline: AI is destroying students' ability to think. Cognitive offloading is making us dumber. The essay is dead.
These aren't just predictions. They're hyperstitions — fictions that become real through collective belief. When enough people act as if AI kills creativity, we build systems that make it true.
But hyperstition works both ways.
Rachel Horst: futures-focused educator and researcher at UBC will lead a group discussion exploring hyperstition, the doom narratives around cognitive offloading, and what happens when we flip the script toward creative possibility.
Then we open it up for group discussion: What stories are we telling about AI and learning? Which ones are self-fulfilling? And which ones could we choose to tell instead?
What is hyperstition?
Coined by philosopher Nick Land, hyperstition describes ideas that make themselves real through belief and action. Star Trek imagined touchscreens and voice assistants decades before they existed and inspired the engineers who built them. The stories we tell about technology shape the technology we build.
Right now, the dominant hyperstition about AI in education is fear: students will cheat, thinking will atrophy, creativity will die. But there's another possible story... one where AI becomes a creative amplifier, a thinking partner, a tool for unlocking voices that traditional education never served.