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: We're adding a new section at the bottom of every newsletter — how we use AI in our work and how you can use it. The historical focus stays the same. Skip it if you like.

---

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. Socrates 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 held. If you can look something up, you stop memorizing it. Written words can’t answer questions or adapt to a listener the way a living teacher can. Knowledge without a guide drifts into the wrong hands. Reasonable fears from a man who spent his life passing wisdom 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 went out, work came back. Not always fast, not always easy, but reliably. 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. Not because AI does it better. A lot of what’s out there is genuinely bad. Flat prose, 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 you get vague writing.

The tool is only as good as the instructions you give it.

It took a few months to figure that out. I didn’t get it in any real detail until recently, after taking some AI classes and learning 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. The judgment calls. The voice. The sense of what matters.

AI can produce words. It can’t tell you which ones are true.

71% of Americans. Writers Were Higher

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 here before. Many times. And 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

The scribes of 15th-century Paris didn’t just complain about Gutenberg’s printing press. They destroyed one in 1476, sabotaged it, chased the printers out of the city accusing them of witchcraft. A Venetian scribe named Filippo de Strata called the press a “whore” compared to the “virgin” pen. Pope Alexander VI tried to suppress it entirely in 1501.

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

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 reportedly walked out of his studio after seeing his first daguerreotype, the sharp chemical smell of silver and mercury still in the air, and said simply: “From today, painting is dead.”

What happened instead was Impressionism.

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

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

The Catastrophe Rarely Arrives

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 consistently hits 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

There is disruption. Some jobs wither and disappear. Some writing work I used to do is gone and probably isn’t coming back. But most writers showing up in those surveys are still in the vending machine phase. Insert a vague prompt, get some words, fix them a little. 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, try Grok for research. Current data suggests it has an edge on the other major AI engines for that task, and research is low-risk — you’re still doing all the writing, you’re just getting better raw material faster. That’s how I started. It took the pressure off.

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, forming opinions that took years to arrive at.

AI can imitate a sentence. It can’t spend eight years in Florence and come back with taste.

Taste takes years because life does.

Research, drafting, editing — AI handles all of that well, sometimes better than a human working alone. But the thing underneath the writing, the experience, the fact that a real person was actually there and felt something — that 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 gave us instead was Shakespeare.

And Tolstoy. And Augustine and Dante and Jefferson and Dickens. The printing press put the Bible in the hands of people who had never touched one. It carried Homer, Virgil and Cicero into 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.

---

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 how we use AI in our work, and how you can, as well.

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. It’ll do that on any topic if you let it.

AI will gush in generic terms about growth and transformation. But 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 actually 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 Corolla with 147,000 miles on it heading to a fluorescent-lit office park where Karen from HR is waiting to talk about TPS reports.

That’s the difference between AI writing and human writing. Details that couldn’t have come from nowhere.

Use AI for your first draft if you want. But before you hit publish, force real life back into it. Specific names. Specific numbers. The thing that actually happened, not the thing that generally happens.

The future belongs to writers who remember how to sound human.

More history essays and AI strategies hit your inbox Wednesday and Friday.

Thanks for reading.

PP