The ancient Greek philosopher Plato questioned whether people who used the new invention of writing would ever develop wisdom in his book Phaedrus. The book is a dialogue between Socrates and the Athenian aristocrat Phaedrus, While they discuss the topic of love, they eventually discuss the nature of rhetoric and, in particular, the subject of writing. Socrates tells a brief legend of the Egyptian god Theuth, who gave the gift of writing to King Thamus, who was in turn supposed to give writing to the people of Egypt. Here is the conversation between Theuth and King Thamus (in the words of Socrates, of course):
Theuth: This will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.
Thamus: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
In other words, Thamus believes that the gift of writing will have the opposite effects to what Theuth intended. Rather than helping them to remember, the ability to write their thoughts down will teach them how to forget. They will lose the ability to remember things unless they write them down. Writing will become a crutch. And the people will suffer for it.
One could certainly argue that Socrates makes a legitimate point here. Before calculators, students would have to memorize their "math facts" in school. I remember having to recite my multiplication tables during elementary school. Later, I had to master multiplication of two- and three-digit numbers, as well as long division. Now that calculators are so widely available, there is a concern that students aren't learning their "math facts" as well as they did in the past and that this may impact their ability to do more complex math problems later on (these concerns may be unfounded).
I've already posted about how the writers Nicholas Carr and Jonathan Haidt think that the Internet and our ability to access information on the Internet via our smart devices has made us all dumb or even "uniquely stupid" (see my posts, "Are smart phones making us dumb?" and "Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid..."). More recently (see "AI is the elevator..."), I've posted about how the blogger Arshitha S. Ashok thinks that AI is making us dumb. The principles here are the same. If you write something down in order to remember it, you lose the ability to memorize things. If you use a calculator all the time, you forget your "math facts". If you are always searching for answers on the Internet, you again lose the ability to remember things. And finally, if you are using AI to do your work for you, your skills at completing a particular task will deteriorate.
These are legitimate concerns, even if they haven't necessarily been proven true, at least not yet. Given these concerns, perhaps the better question to ask is whether individuals who use AI will somehow pay a penalty for doing so. In other words, will individuals who use AI at work be perceived as lazy, unmotivated, or even unintelligent. Jessica Reif, Richard Larrick, and Jack Soll asked this exact question in a study that was published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI"). They conducted a series of four small studies and found that (1) people who use AI believe that they will be evaluated as lazier, less competent, and less diligent than those who don't use AI; (2) observers do, in fact, perceive people who use AI as lazier, less competent, and less diligent; (3) even managers who use AI themselves are less likely to hire job applicants who use AI; because (4) they perceive these workers as lazier and less competent.
Admittedly, a lot has happened since this study was first published. Most notable is the release of ChatGPT by Open AI and the seemingly overnight explosion of ChatGPT use by just about everyone for just about anything. I wonder if the results would be similar if the study was repeated today. More importantly, the study did not determine whether people who use AI tools are indeed lazier, less competent, or less diligent. It merely showed that they are perceived as such. Future studies will hopefully answer these questions and more. For now, we are left with concern and speculation about the impact of technological progress that goes as far back as antiquity. AI would appear to be today's Phaedrus moment...
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