Perhaps it is not an inevitable consequence, but a choice

Translated from the original Spanish article.

“This learning, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and better able to remember, for it has been invented as an elixir of memory and wisdom.”

In the Phaedrus, Plato tells an Egyptian myth in which the god Theuth presents his invention, writing, to King Thamus as a “remedy for memory and wisdom.” And the king rejects it. He says it does not cure memory, but atrophies it.

“You, the father of letters, out of fondness have ascribed to it the opposite of what it can do. It will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, through neglect of memory: trusting in what is written, they will remember from outside, by means of foreign signs, and not from within, by their own effort. You have found an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. And of wisdom you offer your pupils the appearance, not the truth: they will read much without instruction, they will think they know much while being for the most part ignorant, and they will be hard to get along with, for they have become wise in appearance and not in truth.”

Perhaps King Thamus was right; I can’t know. The thought of that time reaches us through writing, of course.

And yet that idea lays all causation at the feet of the tool, and relieves people of any responsibility. And, with it, of their freedom.

Perhaps when the printing press was invented, when digital media arrived, when we studied with Encarta, when we looked things up on the internet, our minds were atrophying.

Perhaps if calculators didn’t exist, we would all be Pythagoras.

Now, with AI, it is often said that it impoverishes our thinking. Once again, that may be so.

But perhaps it is not an inevitable consequence; perhaps it is, and always was, a choice.