In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.

But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.

> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.

Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?

I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.

There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)

(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)

Isn't it always like that, every time?

What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?

Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?

True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.

That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.

But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.

Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.

With every emerging technology or change, let's assume any particular concern about the technology will likely live somewhere on the spectrum from real to unsubstantiated. It seems important to tell the difference, because how will we know where to spend our time, money and effort if we waste it equally on all apparent problems, real or not? So: how do we tell the difference? One way is to look at history, and learn from our mistakes when engaging with new technology. In many cases, real problems emerge which at first might look like tail risks. "Illusory" problems might look real early on, but often have to do with matters of tradition, appearances or status-quo bias.

Let's take an example: the steam engine. How much of the earliest criticism was about the greenhouse gas emissions? Nobody conceived it. And how much of it was about morals, religion, junk science, or protecting incumbents? If we can identify patterns across these, it might make us better at identifying problems in the future, too.

He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).

Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.