Plato, in the Phaedrus, 370BC: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
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And our memory has declined. He was right
Has it? Or do we instead have vast overfilled palaces of the sum of human knowledge, often stored in pointers and our limited working memory readily available for things recently accessed?
I'd argue that our ability to recall individual moments has gone down, but the sum of what we functionally know has gone up massively.
For sure. But through writing we've been able to learn more, and through AI we'll produce more.
With a diminished ability to store, recall and thus manipulate information, our learning is arguably more shallow.
With AI trained on increasingly generic input used by the casual, then the quality of our production will increase in quantity but decrease in quality.
I am not arguing to abandon the written word or LLMs.
But the disadvantages--which will be overlooked by the young and those happy to have a time-saving tool, namely the majority--will do harm, harm most will overlook favouring the output and ignoring the atrophying user.
That's not really the question though. The question is, would we be better off if we didn't have "[the] means of external marks"?
I'm sure somebody out there would argue that the answer is yes, but personally I have my doubts.
I think the question is that were Plato's fears unfounded. I don't think the question is "is writing bad", although it is framed as that to justify a carefree adoption of LLMs in daily life.
It’s all about how you use written content, even before AI you could just copy-paste code from StackOverflow without any understanding. But you could also use it as an opportunity to do your own research, make your own experiences and create your own memory (which sticks a lot better). And it’s not just about coding, you can’t really grasp a subject by just reading a text book and not doing exercises or further reading.
Plato’s (or rather the Egyptian king’s - IIRC) fears were not unfounded, since a lot of people do not operate this way (sadly I see this with some peers), however overall the effect could still be positive.
Writing distributes knowledge to a lot of people, without it you have to rely on a kind of personal relationship to learn from someone more knowledgeable (which can be better for the individual mentee though). So maybe it increases chances of learning (breadth of audience) at the cost of the depth of understanding?
Good job he wrote that down.
Good one
Plato deliberately did not put some of his teachings into writing and only taught them orally, because he found written text unfit for the purpose.
I mean, he wasn't wrong, but he couldn't foresee the positives that would come of the new tech.
But sometimes the new tech is a hot x-ray foot measuring machine.