Socrates Warned Us About AI · Reda Antar

Picture this: it's the 4th century BC. Socrates makes a point using the famous myth of Theuth (or Thoth). He was the Egyptian god of knowledge and inventions. So, Theuth goes to the king of all the gods in Egypt. The king's name is Thamus or Ammon , Theuth was super proud. He shows Thamus a bunch of his cool new inventions. He brings out numbers, math, astronomy, and even board games. Then, he presents his absolute masterpiece: writing.

He tells King Thamus, "This invention will make the Egyptians wiser! It'll totally improve their memory. It's a magical cure for forgetfulness!”. But Thamus just shakes his head. in total disagreement. because he thinks the use of letters will make people lazy, and they won’t remember things from the inside, they’ll just trust ink on a page from the outside. And because of that, they will just have the illusion of wisdom, but in reality, it’s just a ton of information. They’ll act like they know everything. But they'll actually understand nothing.

For centuries, this warning echoed. Socrates wasn't just making a quirky argument about memory, he was questioning whether a tool could ever replace the act of genuine thinking. And for a while, many agreed with him.

Ironically we were able to know this story because it was written in a Plato's dialogue called the Phaedrus. Later on, many philosophers like Aristotle argued against Socrates idea, Aristotle believed that you can't build complex logic or categorize the whole world just by talking. Writing lets us freeze ideas, analyze them objectively, and actually build a library of human knowledge. Other philosophers thought Socrates' hate for writing was just an old school prejudice against new tech.

But despite his critics, maybe Socrates had a deeper point. Perhaps he wasn’t actually against writing itself. Maybe the myth was just a warning. about how any externalized knowledge tool can be mistaken for understanding.

If Socrates was afraid of the mere idea that people would retrieve knowledge they hadn't internalized. What could we say about outsourcing the thinking itself?

For the first time, humanity is encountering a new entity they have created themselves, that’s capable of producing novel-seeming output rather than just storing existing thought. You ask the AI to fix a bug for you and it does. You ask it to write you an article and it does, even better than you, with fewer mistakes. You can ask any developer and he will confirm that it's been months since he wrote code manually. Some even started to forget how to write code. But does the AI actually replace the thinking? Are we close to having a conscious entity that could replace our brains? Or are we even having it already?

If you ask me this, just few months ago, my answer will be an instant yes, and i'll even confirm it with “it's just a matter of few years, and AI will replace all of us”, but if you ask me the same question now, i will take a deep breath, and bring a cup of coffee to explain my point, because it's a bit longer than just a quick binary answer.

AI could give the illusion of consciousness, but if you take a closer look, it’s merely a mapping of existing ideas. The ‘black’ for AI is simply a representation of black, but for humans, it evokes fear, boldness, quietness, the night sky, or even death. For humans, black is not just a color, a concept, or a feeling. it’s a sensory experience that includes taste and touch. Maybe for me black represents a quiet beautiful sky, and for someone else it represents a totally different thing, it’s the experience of the color not just the color. So basically, AI has the token “black” and the links to other tokens. The machine lacks the ability to comprehend the significance of the symbol. It merely possesses access to the rules that establish its connection to other symbols. it interpolates on the map of the world that we’ve provided them with.

But what if we integrate a camera and censors into an AI? That’s a valid point, but it would merely provide the AI with an additional data stream to represent, rather than convey, depth or emotion.

What sets us apart is the unique journey of each individual on this planet. The childhood memory that left an indelible mark on you, the story of your relentless pursuit, every joyous and sorrowful moment you’ve encountered that no one else has ever known. Billions of small parameters and details contribute to the uniqueness of each individual. Unlike the machines that gets trained on disjointed segments of text rather than a single, continuous stream of experience.

Our role is to guide AI on this unique journey, rather than completely outsourcing everything to it. The challenge lies in maintaining your individuality in a world where mediocrity is the norm and resisting the human tendency to be lazy. Instead of simply asking and waiting for the results, we should think critically and go the extra mile to guide AI. As the saying goes,...