An Elixir of Production, Not of Craft ⇥ brilliantcrank.com

Greg Storey begins this piece with a well-known quote from Plato’s “Phaedrus”, in which the invention of writing is decried as “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”. Storey compares this to a criticism of large language models, and writes:

Even though Plato thought writing might kill memory, he still wrote it down.

But this was not Plato’s thought — it was the opinion of Socrates expressed through Thamus. Socrates was too dismissive of the written word for a reason he believed worthwhile — that memory alone is a sufficient marker of intelligence and wisdom.

If anything, I think Storey’s error in attribution actually reinforces the lesson we can draw from it. If we relied on the pessimism of Socrates, we might not know what he said today; after all, human memory is faulty. Because Plato bothered to write it down, we can learn from it. But the ability to interpret it remains ours.

What struck me most about this article, though, is this part:

The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. […]

Thanks to new technologies — from writing to large language models, from bicycles to jets — we are able to dramatically increase the volume of work done in our waking hours and that, in turn, increases the pressure to produce even more. The economic term for this is “productivity”, which I have always disliked. It distills everything down to the ratio of input effort compared to output value. In its most raw terms, it rewards the simplistic view of what a workplace ought to be, as Storey expresses well.