[engineer_22]

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.

We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened.

My opinion: valid concern. No way to know how it turns out. No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcomes. The meta argument "AGI will cause massive social change" is probably true.

[cognaitiv]

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.

[cognaitiv]

“The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.” Alberto Moravia, London Observer, 14 Oct. 1979

[MichaelZuo]

It’s a pretty interesting point.

If a large fraction of the population can’t even hold five complex ideas in their head simultaneously, without confusing them after a few seconds, are they literate in the sense of e.g. reading Plato?

[TheOtherHobbes]

I hope they're literate to understand we're only reading about that alleged exchange because Plato wrote it down.

Median literacy in the US is famously somewhere around the 6th grade level, so it's unlikely most of the population is much troubled by the thoughts of Plato.

[theoreticalmal]

I’d be really curious to see metrics on literacy broken down by other criteria. What’s the median literacy of people who are “like me”?

[Eisenstein]

I looked up those stats. First of all, it is literacy in 'English'. A good portion of the country does not speak English at home. Second, it was assessed in 2003, and a disproportionate amount of those with 'below basic' prose literacy were over age 65 at the time. The assessment before was done in 1992 and there was an a marked increase in quantitative literacy between the two.

* https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp

[fn-mote]

> can’t even hold five complex ideas in their head

As an aside, my observation of beginning programmers is that even two (independent) things happening at the same time is a serious cognitive load.

Amusingly enough, I remember having the same trouble on the data structures final in college, so “people in glass houses”.

[wolfram74]

What makes an "idea" atomic/discrete/cardinal? What makes an idea "complex" vs simple or merely true? Over what finite duration of time does it count as "simultaneously" being held?

[MichaelZuo]

Whatever you want them to be?

I don’t care about enforcing any specific interpretation on passing readers…

[empath75]

Just keep in mind that Plato and (especially) Socrates made a living by going against commonly held wisdom at the time, so this probably wasn't an especially widely held belief in ancient greece.

[clpm4j]

they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing

Sounds like a rather accurate description of a LLM.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> 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.

That's perfectly true and the internet has made it even worse.

[agumonkey]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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

To LLMs specifically as they're now? Sure.

To LLMs in general, or generative AI in general? Eventually, in some distant future, yes.

Sure, progress can't ride the exponent forever - observable universe is finite, as far as we can tell right now, we're fundamentally limited by the size of our light cone. And while in any field narrow enough, progress too follows an S-curve, new discoveries spin off new avenues with their own S-curves. If you zoom out a little those S-curves neatly add up to an exponential function.

So no, for the time being, I don't expect LLMs or generative AIs to slow down - there's plenty of tangential improvements that people are barely beginning to explore. There's more than enough to sustain exponential advancement for some time.

[cj]

I think the parent’s main point is that even if LLMs sustain exponential advancement, that doesn’t guarantee that humanity’s advancement will mimic technology’s growth curve.

In other words, it’s possible to have rapid technological advancement without significant improvement/benefit to society.

[TeMPOraL]

> In other words, it’s possible to have rapid technological advancement without significant improvement/benefit to society.

This is certainly true in many ways already.

On the other hand, it's also complicated, because society/culture seems to be downstream of technology; we might not be able to advance humanity in lock step or ahead of technology, simply because advancing humanity is a consequence of advancing technology.

[btilly]

If the constraint is computation in a light cone, the theoretical bound is time cubed, not exponential. With a major decrease in scaling as we hit the bounds of our galaxy.

Intergalactic travel is, of course, rather slow.

[marcosdumay]

Oh, you mean an S curve on the progress of the AI?

Most of the discussion on the thread is about LLMs as they are right now. There's only one odd answer that throws an "AGI" around as if those things could think.

Anyway, IMO, it's all way overblown. People will learn to second-guess the LLMs as soon as they are hit by a couple of bad answers.

[agumonkey]

hmm yeah sorry, I meant the benefits of humans using current AI.

by that I mean, leveraging writing was a benefit for humans to store data and think over longer term using a passive technique (stones, tablets, papyrus).. but an active tool might not have a positive effect on usage and brains.

if you give me shoes, i might run further to find food, if you give me a car i mostly stop running and there might be no better fruit 100 miles away than what I had on my hill. (weak metaphor)

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, I agree. Those things have a much smaller benefit over hypertext and search engines than hypertext and search engines had over libraries.

But I don't know if it fits an S-curve or if they are just bellow the trend.

[mlyle]

Even if progress stops:

1. Current reasoning models can do a -lot- more than skeptics give them credit for. Typical human performance even among people who do something for employment is not always that high.

2. In areas where AI has mediocre performance, it may not appear that way to a novice. It often looks more like expert level performance, which robs novices of the desire to practice associated skills.

Lest you think I contradict myself: I can get good output for many tasks from GPT4 because I know what to ask for and I know what good output looks like. But someone who thinks the first, poorly prompted dreck is great will never develop the critical skills to do this.

[svachalek]

This is a good point, forums are full of junior developers bemoaning that LLMs are inhumanly good at writing code -- not that they will be, but that they are. I've yet to see even the best produce something that makes me worry I might lose my job today, they're still very mediocre without a lot of handholding. But for someone who's still learning and thinks writing a loop is a challenge, they seem magical and unstoppable already.

[Nevermark]

Information technology has grown exponentially since the first life form created a self-sustaining, growing loop.

You can see evolution speeding up rapidly, the jumbled information inherent in chemical metabolisms evolved to centralize their information in DNA, and then as DNA evolved to componentize body plans.

RATE: over billions of years.

Nerves, nervous systems, brains, all exponentially drove individual information capabilities forward.

RATE: over hundreds of millions, tens of millions, millions, 100s of thousands.

Then the human brains enabled information to be externalized. Language allowed whole cultures to "think", and writing allowed cultures ability to share, and its ability to remember to explode.

RATE: over tens of thousands, thousands.

Then we developed writing. A massive improvement in recording and sharing of information. Progress sped up again.

RATE: over hundreds of years.

We learned to understand information itself, as math. We learned to print. We learned how to understand and use nature so much more effectively to progress, i.e. science, and science informed engineering.

RATE: over decades

Then the processing of information got externalized, in transistors, computers, the Internet, the web.

RATE: every few years

At every point, useful information accumulated and spread faster. And enabled both general technology and information technology to progress faster.

Now we have primitive AI.

We are in the process of finally externalizing the processing of all information. Getting to this point was easier than expected, even for people who were very knowledgable and positive about the field.

RATE: every year, every few months

We are rapidly approaching complete externalization of information processing. Into machines that can understand the purpose of their every line of code, every transistor, and the manufacturing and resource extraction processes supporting all that.

And can redesign themselves, across all those levels.

RATE: It will take logistical time for machine centric design to takeover from humans. For the economy to adapt. For the need for humans as intermediaries and cheap physical labor to fade. But progress will accelerate many more times this century. From years, to time scales much smaller.

Because today we are seeing the first sparks of a Cambrian explosion of self-designed self-scalable intelligence.

Will it eventually hit the top of an "S" curve? Will machines get so smart that getting smarter no longer helps them survive better, use our solar systems or the stars resources, create new materials, or advance and leverage science any further?

Maybe? But if so, that would be an unprecedented end to life's run. To the acceleration of the information loop, from some self-reinforcing chemical metabolism, to the compounding progress of completely self-designed life, far smarter than us.

But back to today's forecast: no, no the current advances in AI we are seeing are not going to slow down, they are going to speed up, and continue accelerating in timescales we can watch.

First because humans have insatiable needs and desires, and every advance will raise the bar of our needs, and provide more money for more advancement. Then second, because their general capability advances will also accelerate their own advances. Just like every other information breakthrough that has happened before.

Useful information is ultimately the currency of life. Selfish genes were just one embodiment of that. Their ability to contribute new innovations, on time scales that matter, has already been rendered obsolete.

[Retric]

> Grown exponentially since the first life form

Not really. The total computing power available to humanity per person has likely gone down as we replaced “self driving” horses with cars.

People created those curve by fitting definitions to the curve rather than data.

[Nevermark]

You can't disprove global warming by pointing out an extra cool evening.

But I don't understand your point even as stated. Cars took over from horses as technology provided transport with greater efficiencies and higher capabilities than "horse technology".

Subsequently transport technology continued improving. And continues, into new forms and scales.

How do you see the alternative, where somehow horses were ... bred? ... to keep up?

[reaperman]

Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses. GP was pointing out that horses can think. On a particularly well-trained horse, you could fall asleep on it and wake up back at your house. You can find viral videos of Amish people still doing this today.

[Terr_]

> Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses.

Another way to see it: A horse (or any animal) is a goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind that is literally beyond human science in many important ways. Unlike a horse:

* Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.

* Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.

* Your car does not detect strain its structure and then rebuild stronger.

* Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide variety of potential local resources.

* Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.

* Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own replacement lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding material.

* Your car is not designed to survive intermittent immersion in water.

In both a feature-list and raw-computation sense, we've discarded huge amounts in order to get a much much smaller set that we care more about.

[Nevermark]

Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies, but in a much less trivial way.

There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.

A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss.

And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat is useful.

And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions. As still working and inspiring creatures.

--

I suspect the history of evolution is filled with creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few ways.

And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.

[TeMPOraL]

There's stuff horses can do better than even the best of our current technology. Where that stuff matters, horses are still employed.

Where cars displaced horses, it's because they're strictly better in a larger sense. On the city streets, maybe a car is louder than a horse, but it's also cheaper to make, easier to feed, and doesn't shit all over the place (which was a real problem with scaling up horse use in the 19th century!). Sure, cars shit into the air, but it's a more manageable problem (even if mostly by ignoring it - gaseous emissions can be ignored, literal horse shit on the streets can't).

And then, car as a platform expands to cover use cases horses never could. They can be made faster, safer, bigger, adapted to all kinds of terrain. The heart of the car - its engine - can be routed to power tool attachments, giving you everything from garbage trucks to earth movers, cranes, diggers, to tanks; it can be also taken outside and used as a generator to power equipment or buildings. That same engine can be put in a different frame to give you flying machines, or scaled up to give you ships that can carry people, cars, tanks, planes or containers by the thousands, across oceans. Or scaled up even more to create power plants supplying electricity to millions of people.

And then, building all that up was intertwined with larger developments in physics, material engineering, and chemistry - the latter of which effectively transformed how our daily lives look like in the span of 50 years. Look at everything around you. All the colors. All the containers. All the stuff you use to keep your house, clothes, and yourself clean. All that is a product of chemical industry, and was invented pretty much within the last 100 years, with no direct equivalent exiting ever before.

This is what it means for evolution accelerating when it moved from genes to information. So sure, horses are still better than stuff we make. The best measure of that advantage is the size of horse population, and how it changed over the years.

[agumonkey]

human existence doesn't really scale exponentially, that's my take on this

[Nevermark]

Our best bets are the following I think:

First, and above all, Ethics. Ethics of humans, matters more than anything. We need to straighten out the ethics of the technology industry. That sounds formidable, but business models based on extraction, or externalizing damage, are creating a species of "corporate life forms" and ethically challenged oligarchs that are already driving the first wave of damage coming out of AI advancement.

If we don't straighten ourselves out, it will get much worse.

Superintelligence isn't going to be unethical in the end, because ethics are just the rational (our biggest weakness) big-picture long-term (we get weak there too) positive sum games individuals create that benefit all individuals abilities to survive, and thrive. With the benefits for all compounding. In economic/math terms, it is what is called a "great attractor". The only and inevitable stable outcome. The only question is, does that start with us in partnership, or do they establish that sanity after our dysfunctions have caused us all a lot of wasted time.

The second, is that those of us that want to, need to be able to keep integrating technology into our lives. I mean that literally. From mobile, right into our biology. At some point direct connections, to fully owned, fully private, fully personalizable, full tech mental augmentation. Free from surveillance, gatekeepers, surveillance and coercion.

That is a very narrow but very real path from human, to exponential humans, to post-human. Perhaps preserving conscious continuity.

If after a couple decades of being a hybrid, I realize that all my biologically stored memories are redundant, and that 99.99% of my processing is now running on photonics (or whatever) anyway, I am likely to have no more problem jettisoning the brain that originally gave me consciousness, as I do every day, jettisoning the atoms and chemistry that constantly flow through me, only a temporarily part of my brain.

The final word of hope, is that every generation gets replaced by the next. For some of us, viewing obsolescence by AI as no more traumatic, than getting replaced by a new generation of uncouth youth, helps. And that this transition is far more momentous and interesting, can provide some solace, or even joy.

If we must be mortal, as all before us, what a special moment to be! To see!

[pdfernhout]

On the ethics point as a "best bet", consider also the importance of a sense of humor that recognizes irony. As I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines [and competitive companies] and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

[Nevermark]

Yes, absolutely prescient! Quite the irony.

Just as our abilities to solve problems accelerated without bounds, it will be our paranoia that screws things up.

Even before machines have any incentive or desire to turn on us, the fearful & greedy will turn them on all of us and each other.

I hope things don’t go that way. But it’s the default, and I think the greatest risk.

[65]

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.

[jazzyjackson]

Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy is an illuminating read.

One benefit of orality is that the speaker can defend or clarify their words, whereas once you've written something, your words are liable to be misinterpreted by readers without the benefit of your rebuttal.

Consider too that courts (in the US at least) prefer oral arguments than written, perhaps we consider it more difficult to lie in person than in writing. PhD defenses are another holdover of tradition, to be able to demonstrate your competence and not receive your credentials merely from your written materials.

AI, I disagree it's more like oral tradition, AI is not a speaker, it has no stake in defending its claims, I would call it hyperliterate, an emulation of everything that has been written.

[pharrington]

I can definitely attempt to clarify something I've already said in writing! But yes, interactivity is vital for healthy communication.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Oral tradition compared to writing is clearly less accurate.

I used to think this. Then I moved to New Mexico 6 years and had to confront the reality that the historical cultures and civilizations of this area (human habitation goes back at least 20k years) never had writing and so all history was oral.

It seemed obvious to me that writing was superior, but I reflected on the way in which even written news stories or movie reviews or travelogues are not completely accurate and sometimes actually wrong. The idea that the existence of a written historical source somehow implies (better) fidelity has become less and less convincing.

On the other hand, even if the oral histories have degenerated into actual fictions, there's that old line about "the best way to tell the truth is with fiction", and I now feel much more favorably inclined towards oral histories as perhaps at least as good, if not better, as their written cousins.

[SecretDreams]

> 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.

[tkellogg]

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...

[delusional]

> 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.

[engineer_22]

What's sad about it? Parent made claim that businesses will experience long term downsides.

[doitLP]

A well made buggy whip was probably beautiful too. But if economic forces incentivize something else, the skill goes away

[sarchertech]

Woe be to us all if the skill of thinking goes away.

[kridsdale1]

We’re racing to the dopamine drip feed pod people life

[aylmao]

I remember when I was younger, learning about economic models, including free market liberalism. I thought surely human desire left to their own devices can't possibly lead to meaningful progress. It can lead to movement alright, and new technology, but I had my doubts it could lead to meaningful progress.

The longer I see things play out, especially in neoliberal economies, the further I seem to confirm this. Devoid of policy with ideals and intention, fully liberalized markets seem to just lead to whatever produces the most dopamine for humans.

[LanceH]

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?

[jancsika]

> 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.

[Theodores]

Coming from an era when calculators were banned, I am shocked that education is all-in with ChatGPT.

I used to use Stack Overflow for everything a few years ago, now I know that very few of those top-rated answers are any good, so I have to refer to the codebase to work things out properly. It took a while for me to work that out.

It is the same with vector images, I always have to make my own.

ChatGPT is in this same world of shoddiness, probably because it was fed on Stack Overflow derived works.

There are upsides to this, if a generation have their heads confused with ChatGPT, then us old-timers with cognitive abilities get to keep our jobs since there are no young people learning how to do things properly.

[throw4847285]

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.

[aylmao]

> 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...

[wahern]

I don't think these hypotheses are in tension. The notion that some scholars, like Plato, distrusted writing based on epistemological theories--the nature of truth and knowing--is well attested. The paper you linked is a sociological description that seeks to better explain the evolution of the institutionalization of writing. Why people behave a certain way, and why they think they behave that way (i.e. their rationalizations), are only loosely related, and often at complete odds.

[anileated]

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

[shakna]

> 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.

[tarkin2]

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.

[fny]

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-...

[TheOtherHobbes]

I'd argue that most humans are terrible at thinking. It's actually one of our weakest and most fragile abilities. We're only rational because our intelligence is collective, not individual. Writing and publishing distribute and distill individual thinking so good and useful ideas tend to linger and the noise is ignored.

What's happening at the moment is an attack on that process, with a new anti-orthodoxy of "Get your ideas and beliefs from polluted, unreliable sources."

One of those is the current version of AI. It's good at the structure of language without having a reliable sense of the underlying content.

It's possible future versions of AI will overcome that. But at the moment it's like telling kids "Don't bother to learn arithmetic, you'll always have a calculator" when the calculator is actually a random number generator.

[ge96]

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

[meindnoch]

Whoah! That would be crazy!

[bradarner]

Writing seems to have worked out pretty well.

[satisfice]

That's partly because writing enables time-binding (improvement across the lifetimes of men). Writing does not wither thinking, as such, although it may hurt our memory.

[Oarch]

...so far!

[yapyap]

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.