The Greek philosopher Plato believed writing things down was a bad idea, this according to something he himself committed to paper when authoring ‘Phaedrus.’ Repeating sound advice from his accountant perhaps? More likely this touched on something still causing angst today, especially regarding the use of mobile phones and the Internet. Plato felt that writing was an ineffective means of teaching as it discouraged readers from thinking for themselves, instead they merely accepted the ideas of others. And to some degree you can see his point, especially as we now use Internet search as a prosthetic and our reliance on information stored on servers in London Docklands or Silicon Valley means that part of our brain which processed memories gets less exercise these days.
Just as it would have been impossible for Plato to eschew the use of pen and paper and commit his ‘Republic’ and other works to memory so it is likely that, during the writing of ‘Timeous’ he would have typed ‘Atlantis’ into Google Maps. (‘Plato at The Googleplex’ by Rebecca Newberg Goldstein makes interesting reading in this respect.) And if Plato’s philosophy had been developed with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT what impact would this have had on the development of western thought? The conversations with the robot throw some light on this, providing objective insights into the working of the mind; the first dealing with consciousness and the second intelligence.
From the early days of AI, and the Turing test alluded to this, our subjective understanding of the human condition has been challenged. There is a growing acceptance that consciousness and the ability to reason are not unique to humans. Maybe had Plato’s dialogs been with the robot rather than Socrates even he would have been convinced that all human intelligence, not just the ersatz variety marketed by Google and Microsoft as AI, is artificial.