I'm concerned innovations in LLMs will silently replace human expertise in unverifiable and bitrot ways ultimately leading to widespread decline in mastery in many fields and possibly the loss of ability to teach, mentor, or maintain incomes of actual subject matter experts gradually to a point where no human SMEs can be found for critical technology or research necessary for organized civilization. Brave New World-Idiocracy with such incapable people in it. I'm betting climate change will also get us with hypercanes and famine affecting billions roughly at the same time.
> ... And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
Note that the criticism is mostly spot on!
I spend some time in an internet forum where memory athletes hang out and you'd be surprised at what the human ability to remember can actually be.
This is from Phaedrus by Plato.
There are a few extra observations in the following text that nicely seems applicable to LLMs
