The punched cards, the cash register, the wires of the telgraph all played big parts in building the web of informations in which we live today. Each new information technology, in its time, makes storage and transmission technologies bloom, and each new one throws the others into relief. Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th century, resisted his era new media "hype":
"The invention of printing, though ingenius, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter"
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the history of information becoming aware of itself. So i find myself thinking like Thomas Hobbes (not comparing the two of us tough) for my era new media hype, but contrary to him, I don't think it's a small step, it's a huge step (and I also like it), the internet, social networks, LLMs. I think that we are living one of these big shifts in the level of abstraction of the human thought, like for Hobbes was the print, for us it's the internet and AI, and for Aristotle was writing down systematically what he thought and knew.
For the greek philosophers this big change was starting to write down stuff, it seems easy to us, but it was a new paradigm, and the result allowed to externalize thinking, have external storage that allowed people to work with more freedom, you no longer had to remember everything. I think about how many different things the brain of Socrates had to do, when writing down things was not the norm, probably some really incredible stuff, but the word was fleeting, and often lost or corrupted by the chain of people transmitting information. A layer of abstraction was created over the oral transmission of informations, and this allowed to preserve, transmit, and build upon information and discoveries made in the past.
From the book "The Information-A history, a theory, a flood":
Plato, channeling the nonwriter Socrates, warned that this technology(writing) meant impoverishment: "This invention will produce forgetulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will descourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding and you offer your pupils the appearence of wisdom, not true wisdom."
Writing appeared to draw knowledge away from the person, to place their memories in storage. It also separated the speaker from the listener, by so many miles or years. The deepest consequences of writing, could hardly be foreseen, but even Plato could see some power of this disconnection.
Many layers, "disconnections" where added to the transmission of informations during history, and recently one more, LLMs. Now we have abstracted human thinking to a very high level, with respect to informations, we no longer have to remember it (written word), we no longer have to go into other cities or countries to find it (telephones), we no longer have to spend a lot of effort (or go out of the house) to find it (the internet), and now, we don't even have to search for it, we can just ask one single question, and AI will take care of the rest, the only thing that remains to us is having the idea, what will the next step be? Although i made a big oversimplification of whats going on, i think that this is the trend, and like Thomas Hobbes, i don't like it, or better, i like it (🤔) but i think that it will have big ripercussions on the avarege ability of critical thinking of people, and that is because, as always, when something becomes too simple to get, it loses value, and if the only thing we need to do is ask the AI for the answer, we will not have the time to do that necessary struggle we have to do when approaching new things. Without the problems and the difficulties, the knowledge is superficial, and i speak from personal experience, maybe for someone else this is different, but i find many people agreeing with me on this.
The question i make myself is, do we have invented the elixir of knowledge and intelligence? or is it just the appearence of knowledge and intelligence? And here I am not speaking of machines, but just from the humans POV. Am i like Thomas Hobbes? Grumping about the new stuff? Maybe! But i feel that that these new technologies carry a strong power of disconnection.
