Socrates, Shakespeare and Scrabble

If you’re a writer, or a reader, you will know who Socrates was. The Ancient Greek philosopher whose writings have illuminated philosophical discourse for millennia since his untimely death, right?

Except that’s not true.

Nobody’s arguing that Socrates wasn’t a great philosopher, a great debater (possibly the greatest ever) and a highly principled person.

But did you know he was illiterate?

And not just nominally illiterate, but aggressively, determinedly illiterate. Which is to say that he may well have known how to write, but he refused to do so.

In fact, he saw the simple acts of reading and writing as the first steps on the way to the dumbing down of humanity.

His explanation sounds entirely logical: if you can write down notes to remind yourself about an appointment, or an errand, or a friend’s birthday, you no longer need to remember them. And if you don’t use your memory, it will wither away.

And, eventually, you won’t be able to remember anything at all.

Was Socrates right?  Well, yes and no.

There can be no denying that reducing the amount you use any of your faculties will inevitably lead to a downgrade. So, by applying Socratic logic, we can agree that any increase in literacy will lead to a downgrade of memory. Such loss is a bad thing, therefore literacy is a bad thing.

Except it isn’t. Clearly.

Perhaps the best rebuttal of Socrates’ stance on literacy – principled though it undoubtedly was – comes from the very fact that had all of his students followed his teachings in this area, we should never have had the benefit of his undoubted wisdom.

It was only because Plato, and to a lesser extent Xenophon, were not only literate but usefully so, that we can today benefit from what Socrates had to say.

You cannot argue that Socrates was not highly principled: after all, he willingly drank the hemlock he was handed after his death sentence (for corrupting the Athenian youth) had been pronounced, simply because he felt it was the right thing to do.

And that may provide a clue as to the problem with many people’s attitudes to the use of AI. And here I am referring to those people who loudly proclaim that they despise it and will never use it, because the merest whiff of AI immediately renders the result somehow “fruit of the poisoned tree”.

As a quick aside, let me stress that I am not discussing the possibility of AI destroying humanity, nor the legal problems around compensation for the authors of the works on which these LLMs have been trained.  Those are discussions for another time.

In the simplest terms, what I am trying to do here is to start a discussion on whether AI is a “good thing” or a “bad thing”.

Quite recently I found a learned article on Medium on this very subject and in part of his reaction to it, one of the commentators aired a story about his experience with AI and his pastime of playing Scrabble on his computer.

For those of you who don’t know, Scrabble is a game where the players are dealt a number of wooden squares, called tiles, each of which bears a single letter.  The idea is to collect enough tiles to allow you to complete a word, which can then be added to what is already on the table. 

Each letter of the alphabet has been allocated a value (E is 1, J is 8, X is 10), so the primary skill is being able to sort the letters you have and decide which will be the most valuable word. But there are also tactics involved, such as when to add your word, to which part of the words on the table to join your word and so on.

The writer explained that he had been playing Scrabble on his computer quite regularly and had achieved a level of proficiency that enabled him to record scores in the 300s. Then he hit on the idea of using AI to assist with the word-building (but not the tactics) and because he wasn’t playing against anyone else there was no question of cheating.

His scores soared into the 400s and he played like this for several months.  However, he eventually became bored with this new regime and decided to revert to his own, unaided efforts. He imagined that his scores would return to the mid-300s, but they didn’t.

He was now only able to score in the low 200s. His brain, molly-coddled by the AI help, had regressed.

I found this fascinating. Because it appears to back up Socrates’ view.

Only it doesn’t.

We shall never know, unless he publishes an update, whether the correspondent’s brain fade was permanent (like the loss of a leg) or temporary (like the muscle shrinkage that occurs during a lengthy spell in bed).

There seems to be general agreement that everyone’s attention span, not just Gen Z’s, has gotten shorter and shorter over the last few decades, and social media have taken the rap. And, as social media are not going anywhere, we can safely conclude that the ability to concentrate on a specific task for a reasonable period of time is not coming back.

Which is a bad thing, right?

And the increased use of AI, even if it’s only to do the drudge work, is going to accelerate this shrinkage.

So at this stage of the argument it seems as though the “won’t touch it” brigade is winning: AI almost certainly will have undesirable effects on those humans who use it.

Which brings us to what in my opinion is the important question: will it be worth it?

Will the price we have to pay make it a bargain, or a bust?

To illustrate this point, let us briefly consider the results of a societal change at least as radical, in its day, as AI – the emergence of the automobile.

Nobody can deny that the automobile has had many undesirable effects: inner-city children breathing in exhaust fumes, millions of tons of carbon gases heating up the planet, thousands of deaths and injuries every month, and yet who would want to go back to the horse and cart?

If the price we have to pay for almost universal access to automobility is sickly children, greenhouse gases and vast swathes of the Earth’s surface covered in concrete, then apparently that is a price we are willing to pay.

If the price I have to pay for using ChatGPT as a research assistant is that I develop an even bigger dislike of, and become even more useless at, searching through file after file, then it’s a price I am definitely willing to pay.

“Aha,” says the ultra-principled brigade, “You’re a writer, AI will take over that kind of content creation unless we can successfully ban its use.  Otherwise you will be rendered surplus to requirements.”

No, I won’t.

Because AI can do many things, but it cannot truthfully convey real human emotion. Just like a single mother can teach her son many things – ethics, manners, loyalty, respect – but she cannot teach him how to be a man.

AI can pretend to be human, but it isn’t. Which means it can never produce great writing. Because great writing is about how it makes the reader feel. And it succeeds or fails in this task depending on its capacity for communicating the human emotion that created it.  No human emotion, no spark.

Consider, briefly, Shakespeare’s soliloquy for Hamlet when the unhappy prince, desolated by the speed with which his mother has rushed into a marriage with Hamlet’s uncle after the death of her husband, Hamlet’s father.

Hamlet starts by contemplating suicide (“To be or not to be, that is the question”), continues by considering how death would provide the antidote to all life’s ills (“the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”) and would be no more problematical than simply falling asleep (“To die, to sleep – no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”).

But then a sudden thought alerts him to a problem (“To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause”).

 It is, he decides, this fear of whatever may happen after death that forces him to re-consider, because

“. . . the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of . . .”

In other words it is a general human characteristic – and in Shakespeare’s opinion a general human failing – to prefer the unsatisfactory status quo to the unquantified benefits and problems of an uncertain future.

Luckily for the human race, however, there are always some people who defy the conventional wisdom and dare not only to dream but also to act upon those dreams, who strike out into parts unknown.  And it’s true that their efforts are often a case of two steps forward, one step back, but the cumulative result of their efforts is the reason we are not still wearing animal skins and living in caves.

Just like the motor car before it, AI will bring both benefits and dangers. Either way it will be a major part of the future – you can love it or hate it, but you would be well-advised not to ignore it.

Richard Lyon

June 2026