>If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
Both his point about writing and your point about Copilot are likely true in part or in whole. Ultimately it doesn't matter — the technology is here to stay and its adoption will be determined by the utility it provides its user.
Many studies show writing things down (on a paper medium, not phones or any electronics however) is very helpful for gaining focus and regaining productivity. We're not storage media; our brains are immensely creative machines but our memory preservation is inferior so we found a good workaround.
If you bank on your brain being the better autocompleter, I got very bad short to mid term news for you.
Many people have more pattern-forming brains than I do -- everyone notices before me when something has happened two weeks in a row or something they expected to happen didn't happen. My brain just doesn't try to predict.
thinking is auto completing by your brain. You don't create thoughts. It appears automatically. Sam Harris explains it perfectly.
There are people who talk to find out what they think, and those who must think before they can talk. You sound like the first type telling the second everyone is that way.
The sentence you just wrote, it came to your mind automatically. The thought appeared. You think you created it. But did you had any other choice? Could you have refused to not have that thought come to your mind? No right. That's the whole point. The thouths keeps coming in your mind. You can choose to ignore some and focus on some. But the brain keeps generating it. Mostly based on the environment and information you are consuming.
I would recomend taking a few minutes and watching the video. I an happy to engage in a healthy debate once you watched it. He explains it much better than I do. If you have ever heard Sam Harris talking you know for sure that he is not someone who keeps saying out whatever comes to his mind. Also he is a nueroscientist.
By autocomplete I was talking in the context of how GitHub copilot works. It doesn't merely recomend code snippets. It modifies the snippet according to context and all like human brain.
This lets me stay focused on the actual problem I'm solving; the higher level problem. My job as programmer is not an autocompleter -- if it was I'd be doing something else.
I think your hypothesis is valid, but when comparing the impact of IDE autocomplete on my experience, it seems unlikely. We'd have to try copilot to be sure though. Note I think the situation is different for beginner developers and professional developers.