I Think, Therefore I Am.

It seems like every generation has a problem with new and emerging technology in their time. Today LLMs, yesterday it was cars and manufacturing machines. But this fear runs back further than the emergence of what we would consider technology today. Technology encompasses more than software and engineering, it can mean something that's tangible or intangible, abstract or concrete, it’s a concept, but a concept that has to be useful for accomplishing a task. So by this definition both stone tools and language are technology. If language is technology then writing is certainly technology, and if that's the case then Socrates, who was critical of writing, was the first recorded and educated Luddite.

The way Socrates talks about questioning paintings and writings sounds eerily like “talking to” LLMs today:

“You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.”

Of course LLMs are much more complex than a painting or text. At a glance an LLM may appear to be a deep reservoir of knowledge and even capable of thought. But what it's doing is making predictions based on patterns it's learned from large sets of data, predictions that may not be accurate. I think everyone is fairly aware of the potential inaccuracies and “hallucinations” that LLMs may produce. And therein lies the real danger Socrates was weary of.

I should point out that I’m not a Luddite, I’m not against AI, or technology in any form. I think AI is essential for us to do the things we must and will do in the future, but I agree with Socrates, to some degree. If anyone asks an LLM anything, it may not remain solemnly silent but it can be confidently inaccurate, and due to their very human responses it seems people have placed a lot of trust in them already. This shouldn't surprise me as much as it does considering similar levels of blind faith people place into other forms of media, be it videos, podcasts, or even writing.

We trust some books as holding objective facts, and we trust the words of some people solely on the basis of the person themselves. This seems to be true no matter the medium, and a fact even during Socrates’ time. Trusting but not verifying is the real issue, a lack of critical thinking is the true danger.

“You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever”.

Taken literally that line could be interpreted to mean that a block of text will only ever provide the facts and opinions as they were written and because it's static it cannot be interrogated or questioned or asked to provide more details or a different answer. While literally true, it's also true that the block of text could be inaccurate whether intentionally or unintentionally, at the moment it was written or sometime after. If we apply that to modern times and specifically to LLMs the meaning still rings true. LLMs don't have any understanding. They have knowledge and are capable of providing you with knowledge, but they don't have wisdom and cannot imbue in you wisdom. Wisdom, being the ability to use knowledge, the way a chef can use ingredients to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. Wisdom comes from the ability to think critically, a skill that you must actively practice and pursue.

The issue with critical thinking is that it's hard, and we as a species tend to follow the path of least resistance. Socrates knew this and he lamented the fact that writing would mean people would prefer to reference a book than memorize facts. This has proven true even today, growing up, “googling” became a colloquial term, and even then there was a fear of us outsourcing our thinking to google. I distinctly remember being in middle school and being taught how to use google and how teachers praised it as a source of instant infinite knowledge, yet on the news it was being blamed for making people dumber, because now you didn't have to “know” anything, all you had to do was “google” it.

I googled that Socrates quote, I knew the gist of it and the sentiment but there was no way I could recite it word for word. I outsourced the storage of it to the internet, knowing I could reference it at any time in the future. Unlike Socrates I have no issues with doing this. Knowledge is just an assemblage of facts and data, although it may get updated with more accurate information, it's still just facts that for the most part are static. There are too many things to memorize, too many wide and specialized fields of interest for any one human to realistically remember even if they wanted to. Technology helps us with this, and I think we should use it to do so.

Critical thinking on the other hand should not be outsourced. Books, audio, and video cannot think, obviously, but neither can LLMs. Not to mention that due to editing, the addition of or absence of some data, could mean the source is biased or completely wrong. Beyond the risk of being misled, it also takes agency from you. We are influenced by the information we come across, no matter the source, whether we trust it or not, it will have an effect on us in various ways. Without actively and consciously stopping to reason about the information we are faced with, we risk having it guide our future actions and decisions. Advertising is famous for its ability to overtly and subliminally influence the spending habits of groups of people. And recently we have seen first hand how powerful social media and propaganda is when wielded in politics.

A dangerous game people on social media seem to be playing recently is outsourcing their thoughts to LLMs. This may be a sampling bias inherent to the sort of people who post on social media, but it seems more and more people are just posting the output of what an LLM responded to them with. They have made themselves an empty vessel, a mechanism only useful for passing information from the LLM to the public. Sure these people may be asking the initial question, but effectively what they're doing is asking for either a confirmation bias loop, or for the LLM to tell them what they should think.

Do not forget to think for the sake of completion. Skipping the thinking phase by reading a film synopsis, book analysis, podcast discussions, or LLM responses gives you the distilled details, but it robs you of the nuances. Thinking is a very human thing to do, but it's also a very personal thing that may be the one thing that actually shapes you as a person. Remember to think, because as Rene Descartes’ first philosophical principle states, “I think, therefore I am”, and if you're not actively thinking, then what are you?