Location: Umrath Hall | Room 140
Are our anxieties about artificial intelligence really new? In this talk, a fresh reading of Plato’s Phaedrus traces today’s debates about AI to a much longer history of technological change, from the invention of writing and the printing press to the internet and generative AI.
Drawing on the ancient Greek text, the talk explores Socrates’s view of language as a pharmakon: something that can strengthen the mind when practiced as an art, but also become a crutch when it replaces thought. Through the myth of Theuth, we’ll consider what happens when knowledge is stored outside the mind, and how written words can imitate living thought without being able to respond, explain or defend themselves.
These ancient questions take on new urgency in the age of large language models. The talk connects Plato’s concerns about shallow knowledge and the appearance of wisdom to the ways AI systems generate convincing language, often without the understanding we might assume lies behind it. Brief excursions into the Theaetetus, alongside the work of media theorist Walter Ong, further explore how technology shapes memory, belief and learning.
Presenter: Stephen Fodroczi, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
Free and open to the public.