2025.12.02

Every technology gets the same flurries of woe and worry before it's even truly born. Plato had Socrates warning that writing would rot our memory—people trusting "external marks" instead of their own minds, gaining "the appearance of wisdom" while knowing nothing. The printing press was going to flood Europe with errors and heresy. Scribes of the time held what were basically labor protests to fight its adoption. When I was a kid we weren't allowed calculators in class because we there was the fear we wouldn't learn to do math, and, we wouldn't have calculators on us all the time. Now I've got a phone that can do calculus if I need. LLMs are the new version of this, hollowing us out or whatever sort of naysay people are frustrated about. There's research that says knowledge you gain without effort fades faster, doesn't stick the same, and can cause you to yield lower quality answers. Which to me feels obvious to anyone who crammed for an exam. The part that keeps nagging at me is what actually gets lost when the effort moves from retaining to retrieving. Pub trivia, sure. The feeling of knowing something cold. Maybe just the specific texture of a mind that is actually filled with information. Could be decay, could just be different architecture. We probably won't really know until none of us can remember why we were concerned in the first place.

You could read a story about how people thought this was all going to go back in 1909.