Some points:
1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to understand the effects of the latest ones.
2. Socrates may have been in large degree right. Imagine that you and your society has been locked in the sewers, condemned to wade in shit for so long that you and your ancestors long ago forgot what fresh air feels like. What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?
Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.
Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.
- None of these are as flexible as writing. They're more expressive, more engaging (arguably, at least to some), and might even be good at succinctly saving certain specific types of knowledge.
Knot systems typically parallel the abacus, having been used for accounting and to keep a record of tax levies. Certainly this isn't the *only* thing they were used for, but this was the case in a number of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, as well as in some Asian civilizations. Certain dances might be good at representing the motions you have to go to while working fields or performing other societal tasks, sure. But a good writing system, in its relative blandness, is incredibly versatile, and can encode not just a wide breadth of information, but also include information about *why* the information is what it is, to the extent that the authors knew.
- I don't understand what you mean by things like "stories with self-correction." In many cultures with an oral tradition, the stories do get distorted because of people misremembering, or through conscious changes in response to social conditions at the time of a retelling; if a 1,000-year-old story with no written record backing it is told today, it's almost certainly not the original story, but the culmination of a thousand years and dozens of generations of sometimes-subtle, sometimes not reinterpretation.
2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute paradise. You explain to him, well kinda, but also not really. Is the hunter gatherer right?
He sees you spend your day working but rarely get to go outside or do anything active. Even when you're not working you sit behind a desk staring at a screen.
He wonders why you bother will all the technology when it made your life worse. Is he right?
And yeah, you could make a list of struggles we have today he never did. But that’s kind of my point - it’s complicated.
This future man has paradise indeed.
No. It's not a phenomenon with a pattern, maybe there's a coincidental pattern to some subset of inventions, but there's no logical reason that would apply to some arbitrary next invention (e.g. the pattern of biotechnology intention have allowed us to live longer and healthier lives...until some guy invented some experimental pathogen that wipes out the species).
> 2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026....
You're kinda missing my point. Many people smugly assume the present is better than the past, and and can point to cherry-picked this-and-that to feel confident about their claim. But almost every modern person has no sense of what was lost, and what prior generations mourned losing. There's a temptation to smugly dismiss the thoughts of those who lived through those transitions as stupid and ignorant, but they have insight that's no longer available to us first hand.
Some of these inventions we're so proud of having may not have resulted in a net-positive effect on our lives, but we don't have the experience to realize that anymore (like someone in a community that's been living knee-deep in shit all the time doesn't have the experience to realize it's terrible life compared to his distant ancestors').
I don't remember phone numbers anymore. If I were to lose my phone, or the cloud, I'm SOL re-adding everyone.
I remember a few numbers of my most direct contacts and depend on backups for everything else.
This is how I for one understood this.
id probably start with "who locked us in this sewer?"
Changes on what humans need to remember what to do have, for as far as we have written records, changed the skills humans hone over time. They change our fitness function. Some of those changes are bad for a while, and then get better. Others are just far better at all times. Others might get rejected. Either way, it takes a long time before we know what the technology does to us: See how cheap printing is directly linked to wars of religion.
So it's not that AI could not be bad in the short run, or even in the long run: It appears to be the kind of technology where one cannot evaluate without significant adoption, and at that poing, we are in this rollercoaster for a while whether we want it or not. See social media, or just political innovation, like liberal democracy or communism. We can make guesses, but many guesses made early on look ridiculous in hindsight, like someone complaining about humans relying on writing.
Writings are subject to known biases such as publication bias, and so relying on them reduces the range of what you can consider.
Therefore, writing is bad for the same reasons that this post thinks that AI is bad.
https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html#:~:text=there%2...
Looks like even back then, they went "cool story bro" on that text...
This could be describing an internet argument where both parties google for expert articles that seem to support their point of view without really understanding anything about the subject.
Likewise with AI the appearance of reasoning without the substance could lead to boring exchanges of plausible slop rather than meaningful discourse.
Simply put at humanity wide scales written information is by far the most important thing you can have. There is kind of a Sortie's paradox occurring where you have individual knowledge that can be held by one person conflicts with systems knowledge that has to be redundant and can be easily transferred.
I’m not sure where LLMs lie on that spectrum. They allow faster access, but it also feels more limited.
Before written word, the uneducated had to just take the words of the (apparently) wise as an authority on all matters, and the only access to their knowledge was through conversation with them. That's gatekeeping and siloing in one go.
And authorities' thoughts themselves often form 2D slices of knowledge once they stop continually updating themselves in the know on SotA. Even if they do keep themselves updated, each conversation you've had with (what a layperson can recollect of it) is a thin 2D slice of that knowledge.
I can think of practically no ways that written expertise is not better.
No. Without the written word, this criticism would not have even existed. There would have been no point to make it. Who criticizes something that doesn't exist?
Also thanks to Mia (she/her), this was a very interesting read.
I was thinking about this recently: The difference between systemic (systematic) learning and opportunistic learning.
AI enables opportunistic learning, or Just-in-time (JIT) learning. It give the impression of infinite knowledge.
Most general concepts are well within the grasp of human understanding.
My curiosity RE the difference between systemic v opportunistic learning was the effect of longer-termed exposure/use to a tool that enables opportunistic learning.