Comment by 27183

This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.

I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.

To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.