Socrates railed against the advent of writing – AI might have terrified him

Socrates railed against the advent of writing – AI might have terrified him

A quick Google search will reveal that ChatGPT, the AI chatbot capable of producing intuitive, human-like responses to complex questions, is a threat to everything: our ability to think and to process knowledge, higher education, the essay, cybersecurity, integrity, accountability, and even to Google itself. The bad news is these headlines are probably right. The good news is we’ve faced similar crises before and survived.


The first such crisis point occurred back in the 5th century BC with the invention of writing. In Phaedrus, master dialectician, philosopher and champion of the spoken word, Socrates, railed against this new invention, suggesting it would bring about mass forgetfulness and ignorance. Why bother to learn or remember anything when you can just look it up in written form? Further, he suggested, the written word, which cannot be argued with, nor persuaded to change its mind even if out of date or incorrect, would produce generations of know-nothings who eschewed inquiry and intellectual rigour, preferring instead to unquestioningly rely on the written words of others.



Socrates thought the advent of writing would bring about mass forgetfulness and ignorance.Credit:Reuters


For Socrates, writing challenged the place of oral discourse and dialogue as the primary form of inquiry. If you don’t find things out for yourself through personal investigation and questioning, he maintained, how can you really claim to know anything? Ironically, the only reason we can still discuss Socrates’ aversion to writing is because someone (Plato) wrote down what he said.


A millennium or so later, we had long realised that writing was not the end of thinking – that what was written could be rewritten or rebutted, either orally or in the form of more written words. Instead of destroying our ability to create a ..

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