Why Socrates Would Hate AI | 391

AI seems to be everywhere at the moment. You can’t go a single day without someone posting about how AI sped up their work and solved all their problems. But with every technology there are downsides that aren’t apparent when it first shows up. Today we’re going to talk about some of those downsides from a Stoic perspective and consider what Socrates might think of AI. “No man was ever wise by chance.” — Seneca The Problem Just like most of you, I've been using AI for different things. At first, it was pretty amazing. I could ask it questions and rather than having to wade through search results to find what I was looking for, it just served it up for me. I could use it to research topics or come up with ideas for my podcast. I've even written full applications in days that would have taken me weeks otherwise. It seemed like magic! But as I've used it over the past few years, I'm starting to see the dark side. And no, I'm not talking about AI destroying humanity, although that's always a possibility. What I'm talking about is the slow decline in cognitive abilities. For years, I've written out the episodes of my podcast. Rather than just winging it, I like to go deep into something to make sure I have it well thought out. The struggle while writing each week is what lets me actually understand a topic — and often what shows me the weak spots in my own thinking. With AI, that friction is removed. When I'm struggling to find points to support or contradict my thesis, it's all too easy to just ask Claude to give me those points. I could even ask it to write the episode for me. But in doing so, I'm doing myself a disservice. The best way to learn something is to struggle through it. When the mind has to puzzle through something and figure it out, it builds a mental model of how that thing works — and it's the reuse and reinforcement of that model that strengthens the skill. No struggle, no model. Software is a clear example of the same thing. When you build an app yourself, you think through how you want to construct it, using knowledge you've built up over years. You understand why you do things a certain way. You develop a deep intuition for the code, so when something breaks, you have a feel for where to look. When AI builds the code for you instead, you're approaching it like someone else's codebase. There’s no intuition because it’s unfamiliar terrain. And instead of building and expanding your coding skills, you’re just hunting bugs. And a skill you don't use atrophies. You become a worse developer, not a faster one. There's also the satisfaction that gets skipped. Part of what I love about coding, and about writing, is the struggle itself — puzzling through something, hitting the wall, and then having it click. Not just getting the code to work, but understanding why it works. When I write, that same process is how I learn to construct an argument, find the counterintuitive idea I wouldn't have reached if the answer had just been handed to me, and catch errors in my own thinking before anyone else does. Epictetus reminded us about the importance of struggle: "Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat." — Epictetus The more things get served up to us without having to think about them, the more our creativity and thinking muscles atrophy. The brain works the same way muscle does — it needs resistance to grow. The more rigorously we train our thinking, the stronger our thinking gets: we're able to puzzle things out, get to the root of them, understand them at an intuitive level. Seneca said it simply: "Excellence withers without an adversary." — Seneca We need resistance to be excellent. AI removes that resistance. Part of the problem is that we're confusing output with effectiveness, and knowledge with wisdom. Knowledge is good and helpful. But wisdom is a practice. It’s effortful, earned through trial and error, through trying something and seeing what works. It's the discernment of what's important, how things connect, and how to make a sound judgment. Skip the experience, and you never build that muscle, which means you won't have it when a real situation calls for it. Musonius Rufus pointed out the importance of practice in gaining wisdom: "Although understanding the theory behind the action enables one to speak, it is practice that enables one to act... Practice is more important than theory because it more effectively leads humans to actions than theory does." And here’s the irony: AI feels like magic because it gives you the answer instantly. But it gets there by predicting the most likely next word, averaged across everything it's seen