You speak with great excitement about something you call Artificial Intelligence. Machines that think. Machines that speak. Machines that answer questions with unnerving confidence. Forgive me if I am not impressed.
In my day, we had Socrates. He required no electricity, no servers, no engineers – only a beard, a tendency to wander into public places, and an extraordinary ability to make intelligent people feel profoundly stupid. If confusion were a measurable output, he would have outperformed your machines by a wide margin. You worry that AI will disrupt education. Socrates disrupted it so thoroughly that Athens eventually had him killed.
You fear that artificial intelligence gives answers too quickly, too confidently, without wisdom. Socrates did exactly the same – except he insisted he knew nothing, which somehow made things worse. He would ask a simple question like “What is justice?” And before you knew it, you were sweating, doubting your career, your values, and whether you should have stayed home.
Let me tell you what actually frightened Athenians. It was not that Socrates asked questions. It was that people listened. Your machines now enjoy the same privilege. People consult them as oracles. They quote them. They trust them. They defer to them. In Athens, we called this a very bad idea. Intelligence without accountability is not wisdom. It is theatre. And I say this as a playwright.
If I were writing a play about AI, I would not make the machine the villain. I would make the humans ridiculous. A chorus of citizens asking questions they don’t really want answered. Leaders outsourcing thinking while claiming insight. Students demanding certainty where uncertainty is the whole point. So you see nothing has changed.
