SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God? PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you? SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men? PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard. SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ?

People moving away from prideful principle to leverage new tech in the past doesn't guarantee that the same idea in the current context will pan out.

But as you say.. we'll see.

Perhaps we're going technologically backwards.

Oral tradition compared to writing is clearly less accurate. Speakers can easily misremember details.

Going from writing/documentation/primary sources to AI to be seems like going back to oral tradition, where we must trust the "speaker" - in this case the AI, whether they're truthful with their interpretation of their sources.

> No way to know how it turns out.

But one can speculate.

> No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes.

Length scales to measure harm when it comes to policy/technology will typically require more time than we've had since LLMs really became prominent.

> The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true.

Agreed.

Basically, in the absence of knowing how something will play out, it is prudent to talk through the expected outcomes and their likelihoods of happening. From there, we can start to build out a risk-adjusted return model to the societal impacts of LLM/AI integration if it continues down the current trajectory.

IMO, I don't see the ROI for society of widespread LLM adoption unless we see serious policy shifts on how they are used and how young people are taught to learn. To the downside, we really run the risk of the next generation having fundamental learning deficiencies/gaps relative to their prior gen. A close anecdote might be how 80s/90s kids are better with troubleshooting technology than the generations that came both before and after them.

Right, there's already some very encouraging trends (this study out of Nigeria). Clearly AI can lead to laziness, but it can also increase our intelligence. So it's not a simple "better" or "worse", it's a new thing that we have to navigate.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...

> No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcome

What a sad sentence to read in a discussion about cognitive lazyness. I think people should think, not because it improves business outcomes, but because it's a beautiful activity.

Gen x here. There are couple things I've been on both sides of.

Card catalogs in the library. It was really important focus on what was being searched. Then there was the familiarity with a particular library and what they might or might not have. Looking around at adjacent books that might spawn further ideas. The indexing now is much more thorough and way better, but I see younger peers get less out of the new search than they could.

GPS vs reading a map. I keep my GPS oriented north which gives me a good sense of which way the streets are headed at any one time, and a general sense of where I am in the city. A lot of people just drive where they are told to go. Firefighters (and pizza delivery) still learn all the streets in their districts the old school way.

Some crutches are real. I've yet to meet someone who opted for a calculator instead of putting in the work with math who ended up better at math. It might be great for getting through math, or getting math done, but it isn't better for learning math (except to plow through math already learned to get to the new stuff).

So all three of these share the common element of "there is a better way now", but at the same time learning it the old way better prepares someone for when things don't go perfectly. Good math skills can tell you if you typoed on the calculator. Map knowledge will help with changes to traffic or street availability.

We see students right now using AI to avoid writing at all. That's great that they're are learning a tool which can help their deficient writing. At the same time their writing will remain deficient. Can they tell the tone of the AI generated email they're sending their boss? Can they fix it?

> We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval.

Utilizing a lively oral trad. at the same time as written is superior to relying on either alone. And it's the same with our current AI tools. Using them as a substitute for developing oral/written skills is a major step back. Especially right now when those AI tools aren't very refined.

Nearly every college student I've talked to in the past year is using chatgpt as a substitute for oral/written work where possible. And worse, as a substitute for oral/written skills that they have still not developed.

Latency: maybe a year or two for the first batch of college grads who chatgpt'd their way through most of their classes, another four for med school/law school. It's going to be a slow-motion version of that video-game period in the 80s after pitfall when the market was flooded with cheap crap. Except that instead of unlicensed Atari cartridges, it's professionals.

There is an interesting contrast in the history of the Rabbinic Jewish oral tradition. In that academic environment, the act of memorizing the greatest amount of content was valorized. The super-memorizers, however, were a rung below those who could apply those memorized aphorisms to a different context and generate a new interpretation or ruling. The latter relied on the former to have accurately memorized all the precedents, but got most of the credit, despite having a lower capacity for memorization.

That's probably why the act of shifting from an oral to a written culture was deeply controversial and disruptive, but also somewhat natural. Though the texts we have are written and so they probably make the transition seem more smooth than it was really was. I don't know enough to speak to that.

> In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory.

Could you share a source for this? The research paper I found has a different hypothesis; it links the slow transition to writing to trust, not an "old-school's attitude towards writing". Specifically the idea that the institutional trust relationships one formed with students, for example, would ensure the integrity of one's work. It then concludes that "the final transition to written communications was completed only after the creation of institutional forms of ensuring trust in written communications, in the form of archives and libraries".

So essentially, anyone could write something and call it Plato's work. Or take a written copy of Plato's work and claim they wrote it. Oral tradition ensured only your students knew your work; and you trusted them to not misattribute it. Once libraries and archives came to exist though, they could act as a trustworthy source of truth where one could confirm wether some work was actually Plato or not, and so scholars got more comfortable writing.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331255474_The_Attit...

It is much more recent than the Greeks. McLuhan, for example, had some good points* about how writing/reading is different (and indeed in some ways worse?) than oral tradition, and how it influences even our social interactions and mindset. Film is different yet again (partially has to do with its linearity IIRC).

So it’s not like “kids these days”, no. To be honest, I don’t know how generative AI tools, which arguably take away most of the “create” and “learn” parts, are relevant to the question of differences between different mediums and how those mediums influence how we create and learn. (There are ML-based tools that can empower creativity, but they don’t tend to be advertised as “AI” because they are a mostly invisible part of some creative tool.)

What is potentially relevant is how interacting with a particular kind of generative ML tool (the chatbot) for the purposes of understanding the world can be bringing some parts of human oral tradition (though lacking communication with actual humans, of course) and associated mental states.

* See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Movable_type and his most famous work

> We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory.

Not exactly.

We have accounts from figures who became famous by going against popular opinion, who aired those thoughts. It probably was not the mainstream belief, in that place, at that time. Don't try and judge Ancient Greece by Socrates or Plato - they were celebrities of the controversial.

Writing has ruined our memories. It would be far better if we were forced to recite things (incidentally, in some educational system they're made to recite poetry to remedy this somewhat); not that I'm arguing against letters and the written word.

And AI will make us lazier and reduce the amount of cognition we do; not that I'm arguing against using AI.

But the downsides must be made clear.

We've had AI retrieval for two decades--this is the first time you can outsource your intelligence to a program. In the 2000-2010s, the debates was "why memorize when you can just search and synthesize." The debate is now "why even think?" (!)

I think its obvious why it would be bad for people to stop thinking.

1. We need people to be able to interact with AI. What good is it if an AI develops some new cure but no one understands or knows how to implement it?

2. We need people to scrutinize an AI's actions.

3. We need thinking people to help us achieve further advances in AI too.

4. There are a lot of subjective ideas for which there are no canned answers. People need to think through these for themselves.

5. Also world of hollowed-out humans who can’t muster the effort to write a letters to their own kids terrifies me[0]

I could think of more, but you could also easily ask ChatGPT.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/08/02/google-...

random thought if in the future children are born with a brain computer and inherit their family's data that would be interesting

Writing seems to have worked out pretty well.

and honestly, reading and writing probably did make the youth’s memory a few generations down weaker.

If you are not expected to remember everything like the ancient Greek were, you are not training your memory as much and it will be worse than if you did.

Now do I think it’s fair to say AI is to what reading/writing as reading/writing was to memorizing? No, not at all. AI is nothing near as revolutionary and we are not even close to AGI.

I don’t think AGI will be made in our lifetime, what we’ve seen now is nowhere near AGI, it’s parlor tricks to get investors drooling and spending money.