Not exactly. Plato was against books because they made it too easy to remember information - people no longer had to memorize facts, because now they could be written down, forgotten, and read later to be relearned. So it was very much someone arguing against new technology making things too easy, and whittling away at humanity’s ability to process and remember information, just like people arguing against AI today.
Ultimately, Plato was right that books made it harder for us to remember information, but the benefit of being able to share information so much more effectively outweighed that drawback, leading to books making people smarter overall even if they aren’t as good at retaining that information. The same can’t be said for AI, which further whittles away at our ability to retain information on top of limiting our ease of access to verifiably correct information, instead leading us toward assumptions and opinions, which is the real reason why this argument falls apart.
Ironically it was Socrates his opinion and Plato was the one to write it down. Not the opinion of Plato (who wrote a lot).
Socrates would have loved AI because contrary to the static written word you can have a Socratic method style discussion with AI that has follow up questions and rebuttals.
AI isn’t “silent written word” that Socrates disliked.
Not exactly. Plato was against books because they made it too easy to remember information - people no longer had to memorize facts, because now they could be written down, forgotten, and read later to be relearned. So it was very much someone arguing against new technology making things too easy, and whittling away at humanity’s ability to process and remember information, just like people arguing against AI today.
Ultimately, Plato was right that books made it harder for us to remember information, but the benefit of being able to share information so much more effectively outweighed that drawback, leading to books making people smarter overall even if they aren’t as good at retaining that information. The same can’t be said for AI, which further whittles away at our ability to retain information on top of limiting our ease of access to verifiably correct information, instead leading us toward assumptions and opinions, which is the real reason why this argument falls apart.
The firehose of false information from AI slop is kind of the opposite problem…
Ironically it was Socrates his opinion and Plato was the one to write it down. Not the opinion of Plato (who wrote a lot).
Socrates would have loved AI because contrary to the static written word you can have a Socratic method style discussion with AI that has follow up questions and rebuttals.
AI isn’t “silent written word” that Socrates disliked.
Plus if we didn’t have books we wouldn’t have dungeon crawler Carl
Plato might’ve been onto something then
j/k but I do get tired of people bringing it up during D&D