#printing press

[blondebrainpowered]

The Far Side

By Gary Larson

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

Pressing matters: vintage printing presses.

[ray-toro-in-a-situation]

Ray Toro at the invention of the printing press pls 🥹

[dominaexmachina]

"AI is making us less smart."

Cool. Let's run that back.

In Phaedrus (circa 370 BCE), Socrates argued that writing would ruin human memory and produce only "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom." People would read many things, seem to know many things, and be — his words — "hard to get along with."​

The printing press: critics warned it would flood minds with other people's thoughts, replacing genuine understanding with passive consumption.

The calculator in classrooms: a decades-long moral panic that students would lose the ability to think mathematically.

Google: why bother knowing anything when you can just search?

GPS: the death of spatial reasoning.

Each time, the same structure. A new tool reduces the necessity of a specific skill. That skill gets declared synonymous with intelligence itself. Conclusion: we are getting dumber.

Meanwhile, IQ scores rose approximately 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century — across the entire period of industrialization, mass media, calculators, and the early internet. This is called the Flynn effect.​

(The scores did start declining — for cohorts born after the mid-1970s. Before ChatGPT existed. But sure, blame the thing that launched in 2022.)​

The argument "this tool makes us less smart" is not an observation. It is a tradition. A very old, very confident, consistently wrong tradition.

If you're going to make the claim, at least know you're in a long line of people who made it before you — and were wrong about writing, the press, the calculator, the internet, and GPS.

Maybe bring a source next time. Or, you know. Don't. The prophecy of doom has always been more fun without the data.

The irony being: the people most worried about AI killing original thought managed to reproduce a 2,400-year-old argument — word for word, without knowing it, without any AI at all. 🙄

[honeybubbletea33]

sighs…. This meme is very dead but I had to… it’s them…

[insomgl]

MRS AFTON — PRINTING PRESS

[gmanmedias]

Newsies themed board (feat printing presses) for @starboystation !

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