Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity at the intersection of AI & distributed networks.

This week I am considering my own replacement, and wondering why I care so much.

In the 1920's, Western Electric's Hawthorne plant near Chicago ran an interesting and famous experiment. They wanted to see if better lighting would boost productivity of the plant's workers. So, they cranked up the brightness. And guess what? Productivity soared!

Encouraged, they then dimmed the lights. Productivity went up again! What?!?

They tried different break schedules, shorter workdays, longer workdays. Every change seemed to make workers more productive. Even when they returned to the original terrible lighting, output stayed high.

How is this possible?

The discovery wasn't that lighting was magic. The research from this experiment discovered something far more profound: the workers improved simply because someone was paying attention to them.

When people feel noticed and valued, they perform better.

It's that simple, and that complicated.

Every teacher has that one lesson where everything clicks.

Mine is an intro to pathfinding systems. I walk out feeling like I've nailed it. Mic drop. I've delivered the educational equivalent of a TED talk.

But I admit it. Sometimes I suck.

Last year, I delivered an absolutely terrible lecture on behavior trees. I was disorganized, rambling, and the engine crashed twice. I was flustered and vulnerable, asking students for help troubleshooting. They started problem-solving with me, debugging the systems together. I had students correcting me, showing me where I got it wrong.

"We got you, Nye."

My students were suddenly more engaged than they'd been all quarter. Not because the content was better, but because suddenly there wasn't an "expert" up there, just a person struggling with the same problems they were.

After eating some humble pie, I found that research backs this up.

When students feel teachers care about them, they work harder, engage more, and actually enjoy learning.

Think about your own education. The teachers you remember weren't always the most polished performers. They were the ones who saw you, who stayed after class when you struggled, who celebrated your victories. They were the ones who cared, and more importantly, who made sure you knew they cared.

Students have amazing "BS detectors." The energy you invest, the genuine concern you feel, the late nights wondering how to reach that struggling student. Not surprisingly, that's what matters.

I might have sucked at teaching behavior trees in Unreal, but they knew I cared enough about them that they invested the time to save me.

So if teaching is actually about caring, can AI replicate this?

Let's be honest about what AI can do, because, (and I hate to say it) it's genuinely impressive. There's increasing evidence that AI tutoring can outperform traditional classroom learning. (below) Students learn more in less time while feeling more engaged. AI creates personalized lesson plans, provides instant feedback, and adjusts difficulty based on individual strengths and weaknesses.

And yes, it can certainly appear to care.

Claude tells me I have good ideas all the time. (Why, thank you, Claude!) It's patient, encouraging, and supportive. Never has a bad day, never gets tired of repeated questions.

But, again. Does it actually care?

To truly teach someone is to care about them as a complete human being. It's worrying about whether they get enough sleep, high fiving when they get that first job, investing your own emotional energy in their success. It's asking if they're doing okay when they're weirdly quiet that day. It's seeing potential in students who can't see it in themselves and refusing to give up when everyone else has. It's believing in someone who sometimes, frankly, doesn't give a rat's ass about you.

The Hawthorne effect shows us that being seen and valued transforms performance. Being truly seen requires consciousness capable of empathy and vulnerability. To be a good teacher, you need to risk falling in love with your students. They break your heart every other day. (The bastards!) But you can't truly teach them to be awesome otherwise.

In the end, it doesn't matter how you show students you care.

What matters is that you actually do.

When AI can generate perfect lesson plans and provide flawless feedback, the most valuable thing a teacher offers might be the one thing machines can't fake: authentic human investment in another person's growth.

I'm not sure we'll get an AI model to do that anytime soon. And maybe that's exactly the point.

Harvard Study on AI Tutoring Effectiveness

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6

NYU Study on Teacher-Student Relationships and Dropout Rates

https://wp.nyu.edu/steinhardt-appsych_opus/the-effects-of-teacher-student-relationships-social-and-academic-outcomes-of-low-income-middle-and-high-school-students/

Original Hawthorne Effect Research Documentation

https://www.simplypsychology.org/hawthorne-effect.html

Systematic Review of AI Tutoring Systems in K-12 Education

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-025-00320-7

Research on Teacher-Student Relationships and Academic Engagement https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1331667/full

Thanks for reading. I do this every week. If you vibe with the ideas I express, consider subscribing and sharing with friends.

We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is a teacher and technologist from Savannah Georgia. This essay was written thru improvisational sessions with Otter.ai and edited and formatted with Claude Sonnet 4.0. Images are from the internet, or generated with Stable Diffusion.

For more information visit https://nyewarburton.com

• Analogous Connections of the Mind, June 15, 2025

• Educational Citizenship, March 6, 2025

• Godlike Tools, Creative Stagnation, April 27, 2025