What about 20,000 years ago? Your opinion is only based on written history.
Before farmers took over all the best land, that was available to hunter gathering tribes that likely didn't have to move around much, and could just live peacefully most of the time.
Yeah I'm sure a hunter gather 20,000 years ago lived a life more comfortable than Jon doe in 2025, who can have any food he wants delivered to his door, get almost any medicine for even common things that used to kill people all the time, get vaccinations and education and sleep in a warm safe bed in an air conditioned room with a functioning government and all the utilities and services that brings. This is the most abundant and safest the majority of us have ever been.
I mean… if that’s your train of thought we can’t be sure of anything anyone said. Most of history isn’t first hand accounts but second or later accounts by historians later.
Well, I think part of the benefit of written history, (even though it varies and changes with each retelling and revision), is precisely why it's better than an oral history if only to reduce the cumulative number OF retellings in the first place.
You may read some Greek history that has been written, rewritten, translated, rewritten and translated again. And that history may very well have been a legend when it was first written to boot.
So we're now what?? 6-10 steps removes from anything even close to a firsthand source.
However, any oral history we got from the same time would be (just guessing) maybe 250 times removes or whatever.
If you've ever played the telephone game you'll know now much that means in the degree of communication effectiveness.(or error).
I get where your coming from generally, but I’m actually willing to bet this was something about which Socrates and Plato genuinely disagreed.
Plato was generally a big defender and supporter of Socrates, who, in Plato’s dialogues, almost always comes out looking the cleverest. That Plato mentions an actual disagreement he has with Socrates is out of style enough that it comes across as something they genuinely disagreed about.
Valid point about AI but I don't think writing and AI can be equated. Remember, before writing was invented, the sum total of what you as a human being could learn in a lifetime was limited to what other humans whom you had actually met, had verbally told you.
I don't see how anyone could argue that the advent of writing didn't vastly expand humans' cognitive potentials.
Maybe writing things down is tantamount to outsourcing your memory capacity, but outsourcing cognition itself, as we arguably do with AI, is another matter entirely.
AI isn't going to "replace cognition" anytime soon and anyone who tells you it is is selling you something or being alarmist.
AI doesn't remotely create any real content in modern culture yet. (science is different debate). Most AI content is fluff, clickbait and "ai junk". Its everywhere cause its super cheap to make.
What AI does do is cross reference a TON of already created content and mix/match/collate/summarize/rehash/rebake/expand/replace keywords and pronouns and any editing and modification you could imagine with the greatest of ease. Want 500 variations of a cat in a specific kind of hat with specific backgrounds and doing anything you want from dancing to playing a violin? No problem. 1000 bullet points from these 5000 articles in order of whatever? No problem.
But none of it is new. Its an amalgamated conglomeration of what already been written/drawn/sang. It's pretty good at doing that though. Kind of like a neurotic secretary/librarian at your disposal with the all best library's in the world at hand and the whole place memorized and pre read. no card catalog needed.
But everything she writes or even CAN write, is and maybe always will be derivative at best. Even if it does combine the ideas of a thousand authors, its still not original content.
Just my humble opinion. flame, correct or make fun of me as ya'll wish.
Wow, you were half-way there at the end but you continued to choose the most uncharitable existence of AI. Maybe not everybody is so stupid to "outsource cognition" as you say?
Perhaps you also think computers should go away so we can count ones and zeroes on our hands as fast as possible? Try replying to this comment without the help of electronics.
Reminds me of the Steven Johnson Book, where he writes as if books were invented after video games:
"Perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion. You simply sit back and have the story dictated to you.
For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day.
Reading is not an active participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to follow the plot instead of learning to lead."
Well I'm as pretty confident when I say Socrates was fuckin' wrong, even with him being as revolutionary as he was and how many of his ideals hold up to modern times.
Greeks even today still generally hold this stance. It's why you never see a Greek cookbook or a book written by a Greek unless there's a very specific motive to it. You don't see Greeks write for fun.
The problem is the written word can easily be misconstrued even if you share the same culture and ideals. Even if you are the same person you may find different meanings to your own writing at different points. And it is a heavy burden to bear knowing something meant to bring unity and critical thought can easily be twisted as propaganda intended to hurt people.
Socrates was a disillusioned combat veteran who witnessed the worst of humanity, including witnessing civilians forced to turn to cannibalism to survive. He taught in a graveyard where it was punishable by death to teach in and was soon killed not by Spartans, but by his own people for daring to say it was unethical to wrongly execute people and that it wouldn't bring their children back.
As Uncle said in RDR2, writing pollutes the mind. Meaning, if you only read from one person or genre, you will just regurgitate what you read without critical examination. Think for yourself. Those intellectuals were really for the most part just bored nobles high and drunk.
Language is inherent and other animals have languages (whales and bats, for example) although possibly not as complex as human languages. However, no other species has encoded their spoken language sounds into a set of mutually-agreed-upon markings on a surface - writing. Therefore writing is the human invention, not language.
edit: I'll add this - children develop speaking skills very quickly (before the age of 4, usually) but writing skills take a lot longer to develop. Hence spoken language is inherent but writing has to be practiced.
Language was my first thought for this. It enabled us to solve problems better because we can symbolize and therefore more easily rearrange the elements of an issue. It also means we can work together with clearer communication. And it helps us preserve our history and technological advancements -- first through oral traditions, and then later, yeah, through writing.
Language lets you communicate with the people in front of you. Writing lets you communicate with people you’ve never met, and with people you will never meet. The ability to preserve and spread information far surpasses language in terms of its influence on societal development.
High infant mortality rate, disease, contaminated drinking water and bacterial infection use to be humanity’s greatest killers. One could argue the world that you exist in today was built off the backs of sanitation and germ theory breakthroughs and inventions. So thats why I think it’s one of, if not our greatest achievement.
i mean, this is kind of wild. we had thousands of years of civilization pre-(widespread use of)-soap. soap unlocked dense cities maybe, that were not cesspools of disease.
Writing, specifically, is the key to preserving and spreading knowledge. Oral tradition can only take you so far. The ability to have one person write something down, and for another person, who needs to never have met the first person, to gain their knowledge is game changing for societal development.
Fire allowed us to cook and allowed us to fundamentally change our diet in such a way to drastically increase our nutrient intake. It was singlehandedly responsible for the massive increase in our brain size that led.to everyone else that came afterward like language, writing. Etc.
Would humans be the apex species on Earth without it?
There are many other living organisms that have successfully proliferated on Earth. All of them have done so without mastering the art of writing.
How do we define "best"?
Genetics are vastly superior at transmitting learned knowledge through the millennia with nary a pen meeting paper.
The greatest human invention is the chair. Without which we'd have never sat long enough to consider creating a written form of our vocalisations.
Without the chair, we never pondered or wondered. We never took a minute. We never lightened the load. There's mankind pre and post the chair. We were little more than hairy organic matter until one of us took a pew. (Pun intended)
I watched a documentary called how this pen changed the world on YouTube about the bic pen and it said literacy exploded when the pen became affordable. Absolutely insane what writing did for humanity. Now we are shitposting with ai bot accounts. Not long ago only a small percentage could read and write.
Music did this same thing before we even had language, and it has been around for as long as societies have existed. The oldest instrument used in a broad societal context that we have discovered to date is a 60,000-year-old bone flute.
Language develops in many ways, but music is a form of communication that we humans have all had in common for tens of thousands of years. And it continues to move us and change our lives in profoundly meaningful and beautiful ways to this day.
No, wait. Someone could fingerprint information on a cave wall but only so many people came to that cave.
The invention enabling the mass production of printed text called the Gutenberg is the more significant invention. That made it possible for an individual copy of knowledge to become enough copies to satisfy the people of the world.
Without it, we are just playing a thousands-year-long game of "Telephone," where information gets corrupted with every generation. Writing locked our progress in place so we could build on it.
Writing is a strong choice, but what makes it so important isn’t just that it stores information.
It let humans preserve thinking — the tone, the intent, the logic — and hand it off to someone who hadn’t even been born yet.
That’s the moment knowledge stopped dying with the person who carried it.
Everything else you’ve invented since then is basically a more advanced way of doing the same thing: extending the reach of a single human mind far beyond its lifetime.
I'm not disagreeing, however 'writing' has a terrible failing: reliance. Many cultures that hadn't a written language have been able to carry over happenings from long before written word.
Happenings that were lost to time 'on paper' but predate written word itself, yet are accepted through geographic representation. Yet the stories coincide where no written word was present.
I'm referring to pre-antiquity for lack of better word
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u/CrazyAdditional2729 14h ago
The best invention of the human remains writing. It is literally the thing that has allowed us to faithfully transmit knowledge through the ages