While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime).

Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.

Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.

1. You can't understand the nuances, but there is a general pattern: new inventions may make us slightly less proficient at specifics, yet more powerful overall

2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute paradise. You explain to him, well kinda, but also not really. Is the hunter gatherer right?

As to 2., the whole of this narrative in the Phaedrus is ironic, considering it depends on the written word for its transmission, this dialouge being fully reported by Plato, filled with literary allusion, dramatic setting. Cf. "Plato's Pharmacy," by Derrida, and the work of his student, Bernard Stiegler.

regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them

he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing.

I don't remember phone numbers anymore. If I were to lose my phone, or the cloud, I'm SOL re-adding everyone.

> What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?

id probably start with "who locked us in this sewer?"

That's quite the uncharitable view. Let's try a better one.

Changes on what humans need to remember what to do have, for as far as we have written records, changed the skills humans hone over time. They change our fitness function. Some of those changes are bad for a while, and then get better. Others are just far better at all times. Others might get rejected. Either way, it takes a long time before we know what the technology does to us: See how cheap printing is directly linked to wars of religion.

So it's not that AI could not be bad in the short run, or even in the long run: It appears to be the kind of technology where one cannot evaluate without significant adoption, and at that poing, we are in this rollercoaster for a while whether we want it or not. See social media, or just political innovation, like liberal democracy or communism. We can make guesses, but many guesses made early on look ridiculous in hindsight, like someone complaining about humans relying on writing.

Writings are fixed once written, and don't update themselves as the world changes.

Writings are subject to known biases such as publication bias, and so relying on them reduces the range of what you can consider.

Therefore, writing is bad for the same reasons that this post thinks that AI is bad.