What do you think?
Rate this book
Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything (and Nothing) in Teaching and Learning
264 pages
Published February 9, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 13, 2026
The title of this book suggests an original take on AI in education, but it does not. The title is a bit misleading. According to the authors, AI will replace certain teaching aspects and the role of teachers will change.
The book warns about the risks of AI but continues promoting AI in education without considering those risks, as if after the boxes have been ticked, we can go big on AI in the classroom.
One of the biggest issues I have is that the authors want you to treat AI as a person. This connects well to the idea of having an assistant and collaborator, but anthropomorphism (the ELIZA-effect) is a tricky approach. So, although mental well-being is mentioned, even suicide, and the fact that the algorithms hallucinate, you and your students are encouraged to use AI as a person.
According to the authors, we should even be careful seeing AI as a tool, because "treating AI as a tool also introduces risks, specifically when we consider what we become when we get in the habit of treating things that appear humanlike as if they are not human and exist just to serve our needs." That raises an eyebrow.
So, the book has a "tech as a goal" approach, how to use AI in education, rather than a human centred approach: when does AI contribute in a curriculum that encourages students to think critically and independently and in what way?
The authors are amazed about what AI can (potentially) do rather than exploring what students need in an AI driven world (literacy, domain knowledge, critical thinking). They tend to see the teacher becoming a guide to students using AI. They see potential in using AI to track student behaviour in a rather dystopian take. They see AI as a solution to keep doing certain administrative tasks instead of asking whether those tasks are really necessary in the first place.
This book is like so many: naming the risks but not integrating them with AI implementation advice. It is AI fan-non-fiction. Teachers need, and deserve, more than that.
The book warns about the risks of AI but continues promoting AI in education without considering those risks, as if after the boxes have been ticked, we can go big on AI in the classroom.
One of the biggest issues I have is that the authors want you to treat AI as a person. This connects well to the idea of having an assistant and collaborator, but anthropomorphism (the ELIZA-effect) is a tricky approach. So, although mental well-being is mentioned, even suicide, and the fact that the algorithms hallucinate, you and your students are encouraged to use AI as a person.
According to the authors, we should even be careful seeing AI as a tool, because "treating AI as a tool also introduces risks, specifically when we consider what we become when we get in the habit of treating things that appear humanlike as if they are not human and exist just to serve our needs." That raises an eyebrow.
So, the book has a "tech as a goal" approach, how to use AI in education, rather than a human centred approach: when does AI contribute in a curriculum that encourages students to think critically and independently and in what way?
The authors are amazed about what AI can (potentially) do rather than exploring what students need in an AI driven world (literacy, domain knowledge, critical thinking). They tend to see the teacher becoming a guide to students using AI. They see potential in using AI to track student behaviour in a rather dystopian take. They see AI as a solution to keep doing certain administrative tasks instead of asking whether those tasks are really necessary in the first place.
This book is like so many: naming the risks but not integrating them with AI implementation advice. It is AI fan-non-fiction. Teachers need, and deserve, more than that.
Displaying 1 of 1 review