At least we're (mostly) not scrolling feeds all day at work. AI is going to be like this for all our professional competencies.
If Hacker News is what passes for high quality content in 2026, I feel well and truly bad for the current generation who will never get to experience anything like the old school SMF forums, or pre-2014 Reddit.
I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.
I don't think the act of writing prompts for an LLM advances thinking/cognition in the same way.
There is another charge against writing in the Phaedrus, which is that texts cannot answer for themselves (contrary to spoken interlocutors) or adjust their communication to the needs and character of the reader:
> when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves
An interesting thing about computation is that it is a writing and re-writing that can indeed be responsive and, in a non-trivial sense, "answer for itself". LLMs do this in a form that is obviously very successful for engagement (and for hype) and for producing a lot of compelling output.
I think the Phaedrus also has something to say here:
> Soc. Then [they who who knows the just and good and honourable] will not seriously incline to "write" his thoughts "in water" with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?
>
> Phaedr. No, that is not likely.
>
> Soc. No, that is not likely--in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.
Regarding LLMs specifically, my view is that the current state of LLM-based AI is leading us more towards '"write" our thoughts "in water"', because
* what we write to LLMs does not catalyze a transformation in understanding of them as systems, nor drive them to evolve in a sustainable way towards truth,
* and their outputs are the result of potent patterns in the turbulence of humanity's discourse, rather than an understanding or systematization that could "teach the truth adequately to others"
While I think their potency cannot be questioned, their sustainability and correctness certainly can be. IMO, AI in the vein of theorem provers and semantic webs are much more in line with a text that can actually speak back with integrity and genuine responsiveness, "teaching truth adequately". But I also guess
* the LLM profusion will likely catalyze some important developments and advances in those other approaches (and some use of LLMs will persist even after advances on a difference basis take over) and
* probabilistic methods are here to stay and will likely be more integrated into symbolic systems and
* we are at real risk of totally loosing the plot, or perhaps reenacting the plot of [Echo and Narcissus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus#Story), and seeing the warning of utter thoughtless wrought by irresponsible writing (as claimed in https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/platos-war...)
Even today, with the current state of the art, we need far fewer experts. LLMs are already much better at debugging than humans are, for example. Math proofs are falling at a unprecedented rate. And so on.
In the future, we may not find mere human levels of intelligence so useful. Let consumers consume.
In the aggregate everyone maybe learns on average about as much new stuff in a year anyway.
There _are_ still humans out there talking to each other.
Except there's mass directives to eat as much seed corn as you can
There used to be jokes about how men don't want to ask for directions...
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[0] - Some new phrase I suddenly saw pop up everywhere in the last few days. Must be popular with cool kidz.
Good. No more growth.
There is nothing anyone needs to 'intellect' more of to make anyone's life better. Nothing. You can stop the inner monologue :)
Nothing.