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Before writing was commonplace, students would memorise works like the Odyssey and Iliad. Before calculators, students would memorise times tables. Before Goo
by wisty 7y ago
Before writing was commonplace, students would memorise works like the Odyssey and Iliad.
Before calculators, students would memorise times tables.
Before Google, students would need to learn about the world.
Before Siri, students would need to learn how to write well enough for Google to interpret their questions.
A few more iterations and no-one will need to think, we can just be shipped around in mobility scooters like in Wall-E. If a machine can make better decisions, why should we even have the right to decide anything?
Sure, that's an extreme position, but this is partly where the concern over writing came from - as new ways of processing, storing, and exchanging information arise we lose some of the old (and more human) ways.
- ConfusedDog 7y ago- "A few more iterations and no-one will need to think" I disagree. A few more iterations people would think more about how to think and improve thinking, and focus more on the root problem rather than nitty-gritty problems along the way.
- xamuel 7y agoI used to think that way until I actually read The Odyssey. I used to suffer under the delusion that all things advance like technology. Thus, I thought, surely a work like The Odyssey must be extremely primitive, as compared to novels written in the 21st century. But in actuality, The Odyssey is jam-packed with narrative twists and turns. It has recursive unreliable narrators, it presents stories out of chronological order, it's full of deep meaning in almost every line. We have NOT improved since the days when bards memorized stories. We have gotten worse. "Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse, not better"--Homer, The Odyssey
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYou do realize that the version you read isn't by any means the original, and is going to be the result of millennia of narrative drift? I'm not saying that it couldn't have been complex, but whatever you read isn't going to be how Homer told it.
- xamuel 7y agoMakes me wonder if the original was even more better :)
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYou're not describing thinking with many of these, you're describing memorization. And I think you'll find that it's a skill to speak well enough for the speech recognition to figure out what you want, and I object to the idea that "google the right way" was a valuable skill - it was a necessity. You're just describing necessities for their time. I'm sure someone somewhere would be annoyed you don't know how to make a poultice to apply to an infected wound, or don't actively grind your own wheat. You certainly don't know how to hunt mammoth, and that would disappoint the hell outta Grug the caveman. > Before Google, students would need to learn about the world. What does that even mean? Read it in encyclopedias? Travel? If it's travel, then there's your answer - most people couldn't, and if it's encyclopedia's - how is that any better than Google?
- bambax 7y agoLearning about the world means getting out of one's bedroom (or cave, for that matter) and gain first-hand experience. No need to travel far. There's a world of difference between reading about grass and laying in an open field under the sun (or in the rain). In fact most if not all sensory stimulations cannot be experienced any other way than by direct, actual experience. Then they can be recalled via words, but not lived for the first time.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI somehow doubt that the mundane experiences of life are being erased by Google.