PERSON
Plato
The Athenian philosopher who drew the line between knowing and seeming to know—and whose Cave, Divided Line, and Phaedrus now read as the most exact philosophical instruments available for asking what a machine that produces the appearance of understanding actually possesses.
Twenty-four centuries before a machine could finish your sentence, Plato worried that writing would finish off your mind. The Egyptian king Thamus, in the
Phaedrus, refuses the god Theuth’s praise of writing as a remedy for memory: it will produce forgetfulness, give people the conceit of wisdom without the reality, fill them with knowledge of words that substitute for knowledge of things. Plato could make the argument but could rarely point at it—the beings that produced knowledge-talk were the same beings that did the knowing. We have changed that. We have built the most articulate objects in history—machines that pass exams, cite reasons, explain the Forms—about which it is genuinely unclear whether anyone is home behind the words. The Cave asks whether mastery of shadows is mastery of the world. The
Divided Line asks whether opinion, however reliable, ever becomes knowledge. The
Theaetetus asks whether right answers with accounts attached constitute understanding. The
Pharmakon names