| > My feeling is that saving writing from AI is like saving thinking from the pen. > If we were to live in a society where building a cohesive thought has to be done completely in one's head and communicating it needs to be done via talking, the pen might seem like a crutch that will make people lose those skills. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates made just about that exact point: that writing was not really a means to remember, but merely a reminder of what must be remembered, and that it cannot convey wisdom because it cannot be engaged in dialogue. Socrates might've been a bit disappointed to hear of recent studies which suggest that the act of writing something down does help you remember. I suspect the same is true of computers in general -- the technology of today that many thinkers like to grouse about for fear it is ruining future generations' minds. And to be sure there are Skinner boxes that run on computers like social media and Candy Crush that serve little purpose other than to sap our attention for advertising dollars. But... the act of programming a computer can be as mind-strengthening as writing, perhaps even more so. To program, say, a flight simulator, you have to know enough aerodynamics, deep down, to express it in a concrete, specific, and succinct way to a computer -- so if you want to strengthen your understanding of aerodynamics, writing a program to simulate it might be a good exercise. (I think this form of education was what Alan Kay was trying to get at with Smalltalk and the Dynabook project.) Hmm... might programming and prompting an AI model both count as "forms of writing you can engage in dialogue with"? I think Socrates might sniff at them as weak forms of dialogue compared to sitting around talking with philosophers, but they're more active and dynamic than reading fixed, printed text and therefore may well present new avenues of education. |