The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface

Text has always been more a technology of control than true creativity, writes Peter Jukes

This new technology is diminishing us. It looks smart, but it creates the appearance of intelligence while robbing us of it. By offloading our memory and knowledge to these systems, we’re courting cognitive atrophy. These new-fangled devices corrupt the young, rewire their brains, and colonise their inner lives. Civilisation itself is at risk because it has been outsourced.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps it evokes The Times columnist James Marriot’s popular elegy about AI and the “dawn of a post-literate” society? Or the warnings of top AI ethics professor Edward Harcourt about how machine learning is progressively weakening human capacities for decision-making and independent judgment?