Opinion | AI’s great gift to humanity could be the freedom to think like a human - The Washington Post
"There’s another way to look at today’s brain-saving technologies — not as drivers of decomposition, but as a purge, a cleansing, a liberation. For in truth, how does it really benefit most of us to know why sodium’s atomic number is 11 and magnesium’s 12? Or to be aware of the names of René Descartes, John Locke, Jean-JacquesRousseau and Voltaire? After all — and it might be seen as a heresy to say so — Pythagoras didn’t know any of this. Nor did Socrates, Euclid, Herodotus, Plato or Aristotle....
Each mind free to ponder, contemplate, ruminate and consider. Each mind free to determine the nature of logic and curiosity (as Socrates did) or define knowledge (as Plato did) or ethics and happiness, as, most famously, Plato’s student Aristotle went on to do.
If our newly made magic devices can do the same for us — if they can run our brains under a faucet, as it were, and rinse away the unnecessary factual stickiness that imperils our own search for meaning and deciding what truly matters — then who knows? Maybe there will eventually emerge a 21st-century Plato, and we will come to think of the Cal-Tech and its kin as having gifted us an entire new set of possibilities to our collective benefit.
Humankind, at last unshackled from the overindulged tedium of the modern world, unburdened by factual overload, could sit back and reap the bounty of being able once again to think. And, by doing so, come to know not simply what we do know, but what we should know, to be fully human"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/28/simon-winchester-chatgpt-ai-ancient-greeks/#:~:text=Each%20mind%20free,be%20fully%20human
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/28/simon-winchester-chatgpt-ai-ancient-greeks/#:~:text=Each%20mind%20free,be%20fully%20human
