very interesting perspective, i remember reading thyucledies and he complains about how historians before him would report the first tale they heard, by comparison he worked dilligently to confirm his history (though since he was inventing this process his standards were not quite modern, meaning he didn't rely as much on documentary evidence, and he had a penchant for writing speeches down when it is impossible they are word for word what someone said).

yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.

once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.

logistics, dos'd. it, dos'd. military planning, dos'd. medical, dos'd.

pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.

it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.

edit: what happened with vmware?

Yes, that's the point Socrates is making here

This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.

I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.

To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.

Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now.

If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies

> I think the trade off worthwhile, however.

But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?

I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.

If we didn't have writing we wouldn't have to memorize that much stuff. The world would probably be worse for it. But that wouldn't have been obvious in Socrates' time.

Ha, indeed! I misguidedly turned to Reddit somewhat recently when the activity on the programming forum I spent most of my time on died down thanks to LLMs. As I got sucked into reading various shit posting on AI, there are multiple quotes daily along these lines. Many are written in a way as if it's the first time anyone has said it (probably most of them are bots). I finally deleted my Reddit account.

Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.

I would love to hear more about this, could you expand?