Socrates Was Wrong About Writing. You’re Probably Wrong About AI.

A 2,400-year-old argument about the end of civilization — and why it sounds exactly like your Twitter feed.

Editor's note: Starting this issue, I'm adding a short section on AI, from the perspective of a writer who knows nothing about the technical side and is learning as he goes. Our history focus is the same. Skip it if it’s not your thing.

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The future rarely arrives all at once. Sometimes it just stops answering your emails

Socrates had a problem with writing.

Plato wrote Socrates down. You’re reading him because he ignored his teacher.

The man who basically invented Western philosophy watched alphabetic writing spread across Greece and predicted catastrophe. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he worked it out through the Egyptian myth of Theuth, the god who invented writing, offering it as a gift to King Thamus.

Thamus said no.

“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”

The logic is strong. You stop memorizing what you can look up. Written words can’t answer questions or adapt to a listener the way a living teacher can. Knowledge without a guide may pass into the wrong hands. Reasonable fears from a man who spent his life passing wisdom from mouth to ear in the agora.

One problem.

We only know Socrates said any of this because Plato wrote it down. His argument against writing survived 24 centuries in the exact form he said couldn’t carry real wisdom. The warning label outlived the warning.

Fear in Spring 2025

I was scared.

Every email I sent was met with silence.

Picking up freelance writing work had been easy for a decade. Cold emails out, work came back. It might take nine days or three weeks, but work came in. Then every email I sent was met with silence. The pipeline dried up. Clients who used to respond weren’t responding. The ones still hiring were paying less for more.

AI had torn the bottom out of the market. Business writing, legal copy, product descriptions, blog posts: anything formulaic, anything template-driven, gone. A lot of what’s out there is bad. Flat prose, fields of em dashes, hedges everything, commits to nothing. But AI is inexpensive and fast. Bad and cheap always trumps good and expensive when a client can’t tell the difference.

You can’t beat AI at what it does well.

I started with Grok for research. Then ChatGPT for drafts I’d go back and fix. That felt reasonable. I was still the writer, the AI was just a starting point. What I didn’t understand yet was:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Feed AI vague instructions, and it returns vague writing. With plenty of em dashes and ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ slop. The tool is only as good as the instructions you give it.

It took a few months to figure that out. I didn’t understand in any detail until recently. Took some AI classes and learned from people who’d already worked it out.

Strange thing. The writing work that disappeared, I didn’t really enjoy anyway. It paid the bills. Grinding out interchangeable content for clients who couldn’t tell good from adequate was never the goal. Losing that pushed me toward writing that requires a human being. I needed to move to writing that demands judgment calls, a strong voice. Specificity and taste.

The words come easily now from an AI prompt. The judgment and taste don’t.

Every writers’ forum online was running the same conversation in 2025. The work is drying up, the clients are gone, what do we do. A Reuters/Ipsos poll put a number on it: 71% of Americans worried AI would eliminate jobs permanently. Writers were higher than that.

That’s a lot of people losing sleep over the same thing.

This fear has been with us before many times The people feeling it were almost always partly right about the disruption and mostly wrong about what came after.

The Scribes Smashed the Press

The room smelled like ink and hot metal. A thousand years of copying by hand started dying in there

In 1476, Paris scribes accused Gutenberg's printers of witchcraft, destroyed a press, and drove them out of the city. Venetian scribe Filippo de Strata called the press a “whore” compared to the “virgin” pen. Pope Alexander VI tried to suppress it entirely in 1501.

The printing press won.

It produced the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. It created professions that didn’t exist before: editors, booksellers, publishers, typesetters. The scribes who adapted found work. The ones who didn’t were left behind.

Then there were the Luddites. The name has become shorthand for people afraid of technology, which is a little unfair. They weren’t against machines in principle. They were skilled textile workers in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire who watched power looms replace decades of craft with equipment any unskilled laborer could operate.

They smashed the looms.

The loom noise inside these factories was so loud that workers sometimes went deaf.

Wooden frames splintered, iron gears scattered across stone floors. The air thick with wool dust and the smell of fresh-cut timber. The British government made machine-breaking a capital crime and deployed more troops against them than Napoleon had facing him in some campaigns at the time.

The Luddites lost. The industrial economy that replaced their world eventually produced living standards that would have seemed impossible to anyone alive in 1815.

Photography arrived in 1839, and painters immediately feared for their profession. The portrait market, which had sustained painters for centuries, suddenly had a faster, cheaper competitor.

A painter named Paul Delaroche walked out of his studio after seeing his first daguerreotype, the sharp chemical smell of silver and mercury still in the air, and lamented:

“From today, painting is dead.”

What happened: Impressionism.

The camera freed painting. It didn’t kill it.

Freed from recording reality literally, painting went somewhere a camera couldn’t follow. Two art forms emerged, where there had been one.

The Catastrophe Rarely Arrives On Schedule

The pattern holds across every major transition. Railroads, electricity, automobiles, computers, the internet. Each one triggered predictions of mass unemployment and social collapse. Gallup data shows the anxiety spikes to 50 to 70% of the population during these moments.

John Maynard Keynes warned of “technological unemployment” in 1931. An ITIF study covering 1850 to 2015 found that occupational churn was higher in earlier eras than in recent decades, despite everything that arrived in between.

The fear is always real. The catastrophe rarely arrives the way people imagined.

Taste Is the Moat

AI does cause job disruption. Some jobs wither and disappear. Some writing work I used to do is gone and probably isn’t coming back.

But most writers who show up in those surveys are still in the vending-machine phase. Insert a vague prompt into the machine, and it spits out a vague result. Edit it a bit and ship it. That’s the version of AI that competes with you.

The other version works for you.

If you want a low-stakes place to start using AI better, try Grok for research. I use it, and it’s where I’d send anyone starting out. Research is low-risk: you’re still doing all the writing, just getting better raw material faster. It took the pressure off me earlier this year.

There’s a writer on Substack called the Culturist, one of the most widely read history writers on the platform. His essays are built from decades of living in places, reading deeply, and forming opinions that took years to arrive at. Spend eight years in Florence and come back with taste. No prompt produces that.

Taste takes years because life does.

AI handles research, editing, drafting well. It may even do than a human working alone. But the thing underneath the writing, the experience, the fact that a real person was there and felt something doesn’t come from a prompt. That’s not going anywhere.

Ruben Hassid, one of the sharper observers of this shift, puts it plainly: the threat isn’t that AI becomes perfect. The threat is that it becomes cheap enough to replace good enough.

History is full of industries destroyed by ‘good enough.’

Mediocre work is already gone. What’s left: defining the real problem, making the judgment call, knowing what a reader needs and why. That’s where AI stops and the human begins. The higher you operate, the safer you are.

Freelancers who’ve figured that out earn an average of $47,000 more per year than those who haven’t. A 2024 study in Science Advances found that writers using AI produced content rated 22 to 26% more enjoyable than those working without it.

The floor came up. The ceiling didn’t move.

Where Socrates Blundered

Socrates was convinced writing would hollow out the human mind. That people would stop thinking and just start referencing, and wisdom would drain out of civilization like water through cupped hands.

What history produced was Shakespeare.

And Tolstoy. And Augustine and Dante and Jefferson and Dickens. The printing press put the Bible in the hands of peasants who had never touched one. It carried Homer, Virgil, and Cicero into remote villages that had never heard those names. Every great idea that survived long enough to change the world survived because somebody wrote it down.

A human voice dies in a room. Writing crosses centuries.

The thing Socrates feared most gave us everything we have. He thought writing would weaken memory. Instead, it gave human beings immortality.

A human voice dies in a room. Writing crosses centuries.

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Thank you for reading! Every generation thinks it’s living through the end times. Most of them were wrong. Subscribe today as we explore why in articles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

We also explain our AI journey, mistakes we made, and how you may avoid them in your work.

Draft Your Creative Content With AI. Write Like a Human.

Most AI writing floats. Including this history essay, if I let ChatGPT write it straight without my input. I allowed AI to be vague two months ago. My content showed it.

Not anymore. You have to show it who’s boss.

AI will gush in generic terms about growth and transformation. It will never once name the cold coffee on your desk or the client email that wrecked your Tuesday. Your eyes glaze over as you read because nothing requires you to see anything.

People read it and think: AI slop.

The fix is easy.

Specificity.

Not “a tired worker drives to his job” — but a broke guy in a Toyota Camry with 147,529 miles on it heading to a fluorescent-lit office park where Kim from HR is waiting to talk about TPS reports.

That’s the difference between AI writing and human writing. Humans add details and experience that is hard for machines to fake.

Use AI for your first draft if you want. But before you hit publish, force real life back into it. Insert specific names and numbers. Describe the detailed thing that happened, not the thing that generally happens.

The future belongs to writers who remember how to sound human. I’m learning how. You can, too.

PP