We’ve lived through a skills apocalypse before. The solution might look like a flight simulator
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
FAST COMPANY — Roughly 2,400 years ago, Socrates warned that a dangerous new technology would hollow out the human mind.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, he tells the story of the Egyptian god Theuth, who presents writing to the king as a gift that will make people wiser. The king doesn’t agree. Writing, he replies, will do the opposite: People will stop exercising their memory because they’ll trust the marks on the page instead. They will have the appearance of wisdom without the reality of being wise.
He was right. The prodigious oral memory of the ancient world did wither once knowledge could be set down and retrieved. A skill that is not used atrophies.
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