Writing didn't destroy memory, it externalised it and made it stable and shareable. That was absolutely transformative, and far more useful than being able to re-improvise a once-upon-a-time heroic poem from memory.
It hugely enhanced synthetic and contextual memory, which was a huge development.
AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Of course we identify with cognition in a way we didn't do with rote memory. But we should possibly identify more with synthetic and creative cognition - in the sense of exploring interesting problem spaces of all kinds - than with "I need code to..."
> AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Wouldnt the endgame of externalized cognition be that humans essentially become cogs in the machine?
Regardless of whether memory was externalised, it’s still the case that it was lost internally, that much is true. If you really care about having a great internal memory then of course you’ll think it’s a downside.
So we’ve externalised memory, we’ve externalised arithmetic. Personally the idea of externalising thinking seems to be the last one? It’s not clear what’s left inside us of being a human once that one is gone
It did destroy memory though. I would bet any amount of money that our memories in 2026 are far, far worse than they were in 1950 or 1900.
In fact, I can feel my memory is easily worse now than from before ChatGPT's release, because we are doing less hard cognitive work. The less we use our brain's the dumber we get, and we are definitely using our brains less now.
It's not writing that destroys memory. It's fast/low-cost lookup of written material that destroys memory. This is why people had strong memory despite hundreds of years of widespread writing, and it suddenly fell through the floor with the introduction of widespread computers, internet, and smartphones.
we existing in a stunningly more abstract and complex society than we did even 100 years. Unless you are reasonably intelligent its incredibly difficult to even navigate the modern world.
It hugely enhanced synthetic and contextual memory, which was a huge development.
AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Of course we identify with cognition in a way we didn't do with rote memory. But we should possibly identify more with synthetic and creative cognition - in the sense of exploring interesting problem spaces of all kinds - than with "I need code to..."