Mary Harrington: "One of the phrases I have been kicking around lately is “The Great Forgetting”: a hunch that in embracing AI, as an extension both of our capacity to remember and of our heuristic faculties in retrieving and arranging what is remembered, we run the risk of allowing faculties to wither that are in fact central to our capacity to think. (I made this case, and also that it is unevenly distributed across social classes, recently in the New York Times.) Building on these themes, my working hypothesis is that at least at the collective level AI is survivable, but only provided we counter... social.ayjay.org

@calebgreene But when it was on the subject of letters: “But this,” said Theuth, “my king, is the study that will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory: for what has been discovered is a drug to enhance memory and wisdom.” But the other replied: “My most artful Theuth, one man is able to give birth to the elements of an art, but it takes another to judge what measure of harm and benefit it has for those who are planning to use it. And now you, being the father of letters, through your affection for them have stated the opposite of their capabilities. For this invention will bring about forgetfulness in the souls of its learners from the lack of practice in use of their memory, inasmuch as through their reliance on writing they are reminded of things as a result of alien impressions which are from outside, and not from within, themselves by themselves. You have found a drug not for memory but for reminding. You are giving your students a semblance of wisdom, not the real thing. You see, having become, through you, widely read without teaching they will think they are very knowledgeable, while for the most part they are ignorant and will be difficult to associate with because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of the reality.”

– Plato, Phaedrus 274e–75b (tr. LCL)

@JudsonGreene incredible. “Nor for memory but for reminding”