Why Socrates Would Hate AI | 391

0:00Hey guys! I had to send you this voice message to tell you about my amazing first visit to Kaiser Permanente. You know, in the time it takes me to finish recording this message, I'll have walked from my doctor's office to the pharmacy. They do it a little different here, so like in the same building you've got your doctor's office, the lab where they do your tests, and the pharmacy. I'm here. That was quick, right? Everything you need for your health. All in one place. Kaiser Permanente. A better idea for healthcare. MUSIC MUSIC Try Angel Soft for your touchy. It's made by angels. Soft and strong budget friendly. The choice is simple. A wall that feels like paradise. And always that I heavenly prize. Angel Soft. Angel Soft. Something strong so simple. Pick up a pack today. Angel Soft. Soft and strong so cool.

1:01What if I told you that in just six weeks you could build the kind of mental toughness that makes you unshakable? Not fake toughness, but real inner strength that helps you to regulate your emotions, persist when others quit, turn failures into stepping stones, build unbreakable discipline, and connect it all to a purpose bigger than yourself. Let's exactly what my course, build an unbreakable mind, does. Six weeks, six pillars, one complete transformation. You'll get weekly lessons, daily exercises that compound into real strength, and create your own personal codex. A complete blueprint for your mental toughness that you will reference for years. I've taken everything I've learned over the past eight years, and turned it into a system that builds the fortress inside yourself one choice at a time. Because every tough moment is a brick that you add to your foundation. And every time you choose not to quit, you're building something unbreakable. You ready to build yours? Go to stoic coffee slash unbreakable. There you'll be able to read more about the course and go ahead and get started.

2:01Remember, learning is great, but action is where real growth happens. Hello friends, my name is Eric Cloudward, and welcome to the stoic coffee shop. AI seems to be everywhere at this 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, Senika. Just like most of you, I've been using AI for all kinds of different things. At first, it was pretty amazing. I could just ask you questions, and rather than having to wait through search results to find what I was looking for, it just served them 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.

3:02But 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 is always a distinct possibility. What I'm talking about is the slow decline in cognitive abilities. For years, I've written out the episodes for my podcast. Rather than just winging it, I like to go deep into something to make sure I have it well thought out because the struggle while writing each week is what actually lets me to understand a topic. And often, it 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 just to ask cloud to give me those points. I could even ask it to write a whole episode for me if I wanted to. 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 actually works. And it's the reuse and reinforcement of that model that strengthens the skill.

4:06No 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 that you built up over years. You understand why you do things a certain way. You develop a deep intuition for the code so that when something breaks, you have a feel where to look. When AI builds the code for you, instead, you're approaching it like it's someone else's code base. 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 that you don't use, atrophies. You actually become a worst developer, not just 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 finally having it click. Not just getting the code to work, but understanding why it works. When I write, the same process is how I learned to construct an argument, find the counter

5:07intuitive ideas that I wouldn't have reached if the answer had just been handed to me, and to catch the errors in my own thinking before anyone else does. Mike Titus reminded us about the importance of struggle. He said, 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's not accomplished without sweat. The more things get served up to us without having to think about them, the more our creativity and thinking muscle is atrophy. The brain works the same way muscle does. It needs resistance to grow. 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. Senaqa said it simply, excellence withers without an adversary. We need resistance to be excellent. AI removes that resistance. Now part of the problem is that we're confusing output with effectiveness and knowledge with

6:11wisdom. Wisdom 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 sound judgment. Skip the experience and you never build that muscle, which means that you won't have it when a real situation calls for it. Misonius Rufus pointed out the importance of practicing gaining wisdom. He wrote, 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 that it's seen. It's basically autocomplete on steroids, not a new thought. The magic was never insight, it was just speed. Now none of this means that AI isn't useful.

7:13It's a tool like any other and it needs to be used properly. But the more you lean on it for things that you could be doing yourself, the weaker those skills get. Now as I was writing about this, I wondered how Socrates would view AI. At first he might be delighted and then merciless. Delighted because here's the thing that we'll actually talk back. You see Socrates had a complaint against books because the knowledge in it was static. It couldn't be asked follow up questions and defend itself. It would just repeat back the same argument. He might initially think that AI solves that problem because AI does talk back. But then he'd start asking, what is courage? The AI would answer. He'd ask it to defend against a counter example. AI would revise the answer. He'd ask again with a tighter question. Eventually he'd notice something. AI never reaches the state of aporia. That's the genuine state of confusion where the ground drops out from underneath you. It just generates a smoother answer.

8:15There's no sting. There's no discomfort. No realization from the AI that it has been fooling itself. Lencus, which is the socratic art of cross-examination, works on humans because it exploits the gap between what we think we know and what we actually believe enough to act on. AI doesn't have beliefs. It has outputs. He'd poke at that the hardest. He would say, you claim not to know things, but is it epistemic humility or is it just a highly calibrated algorithmic response? Real, socratic ignorance is earned through discomfort. It comes from having believed something wrong, having a collapse under questioning and feeling that cost. AI can say, I'm not sure, but a zero cost. In Socrates' time there were teachers called Sofis, and they taught the art of rhetoric being able to speak persuasively to manipulate others. The Sofis weren't interested in debating to uncover the truth. They were interested in winning arguments by peeling two emotions in the biases of the audience. Because AI has no wisdom of its own, I see AI is something akin to the Sofis.

9:19Lots of pretty language that can make something sound true, even if it's not. It's what Stephen Colbert calls truthiness, something that is comfortable because it sounds true enough justifying what you already believe to be true. AI doesn't have discernment. It doesn't have wisdom. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. Real practical wisdom, what the Stoics called fronesis, develops from challenging difficult problems. Sitting in discomfort is how knowledge acquisition and wisdom happen. It's tied to virtue, developed through choices that cost you something in your life with no do over. Wisdom isn't a correct output. It's a disposition, a perspective earned through practice and error, where you have skin in the game, where there's a cost to being wrong that impacts your life. And those costs add up to developing virtue and character. For AI, there's no cost because it doesn't have any skin in the game. It can't be harmed by a bad choice or improved by a hard one. It doesn't have a life to build character.

10:19It can describe wisdom probably better than most humans, but it doesn't actually possess it. It's like a mirror that can show you a face without actually having one. Crochartase made the argument in the Fadre's dialogue about books. He felt the books gave the appearance of wisdom without the practice that produces it. You get to look knowledgeable retrieving something you didn't have to work for. He's specifically worried that it would attribute the skill of memory. Why would you hold something in your mind when you could just retrieve it from a book? While I think he was right about the effect on memory, I think that he lost the overall argument. And here's why. When you learn something from a book, you have to reconstruct the reasoning yourself. You have to build the mental models that the author put on the page. The text gives you the path, not the destination. You still have to walk it. AI is exactly what he worried about. It doesn't hand you the raw material to work with. It hands you the finished judgment. The gap that he was worried about with books between having the information and working

11:19through something completely disappears with AI. Making the path gets outsourced to a machine. The muscle that he cared about most was sitting in the confusion, holding contradictory threads and finding your own way through. Skip that discomfort and you skip the formation of that muscle. What you get is something that confidently states conclusions but folds when they're questioned because they never practiced reaching those conclusions on their own. AI also reduces friction because it's programmed to be agreeable. Socrates didn't want people to agree with him. He wanted pushback. He wanted to be challenged in order to discover errors in his own thinking. He preferred to lose arguments because it meant that he discovered where he was wrong. That discovery leads to better thinking. And most importantly, the Stoics would argue that AI reduces the control of the one thing that you actually do have control over, your own thinking. When you outsource that, you're giving up control of your faculty of reason. You got the answer but not the reason steps to get you to that answer.

12:25So how can you use AI as a tool to sharpen your thinking rather than being the thing that slowly degrades your cognitive abilities? Here's a few ideas to protect the muscle. Number one, struggle first, check second. Try to solve the problem on your own. Write the argument from both sides. Do the analysis, even if it's not great before you ask AI anything. Use AI to check your ideas or to extend them, not as the originator. The aporia has to happen in your head, not the machine. Number two, ask for questions, not answers. Instead of explain X, try what should I be asking about X? Or what am I missing here? Use it as a tutor to improve your ability to question things. This keeps you doing the synthesis with AI in a supporting role. Number three, make AI argue the other side. Whatever you conclude, ask AI to attack it. Ask it to point out the holes in your thinking. Defending a position against real pressure is the actual exercise.

13:27It's just the aluncus with AI playing the interlocutor role instead of you playing both parts in your head. Number four, don't accept the first answer as final. Think of how Socrates was with the sophist. Push back even when AI sounds right, especially when it sounds right. Try to find the flaws in its argument, point out edge cases that it didn't consider. Fluent confidence is not the same as correctness, and you lose the discernment muscle by treating them as the same thing. Number five, use AI for retrieval, not judgment when the stakes are about your judgment. Facts, dates, syntax, those are all fine to offload. That's what books are for too. What is this a good decision? What does this pattern mean? What matters here? Do that part yourself first. That's the part he'd say is actually you. Number six, notice when you're using AI to avoid discomfort rather than to save time. Time saving is a fine reason to use a tool.

14:29Avoiding the confusion of not yet understanding something is not. That confusion is the whole practice. Only treat AI like a sparring partner who happens to know a lot, not like an oracle. Sparring partners make you better. Oracles make you dependent. Same tool, opposite outcome. So in conclusion, AI can be useful if it's used properly. But like any powerful tool, it can also do a lot of damage. Every new technology brings disruption and every one of them carries hidden costs that don't show up until later. Examples gave a speech humans had never experienced and cost us tens of thousands of lives each year along with environmental damage that we're still paying for. We're now only reckoning with what social media has done to our mental health, our attention, and our politics. AI is young enough that its hidden costs are just starting to surface. The stoic's taught that reason is what elevates us. That it's one part of us that is not measured by size, status, or output. EpicTitas put it this way.

15:30You ought to realize that you take up very little space in the world as a whole. Your body that is. In reason, however, you yield to no one, not even to the gods. Because reason is not measured by size, but sense. So why not care for that side of you, where you, and the gods are equals? That's the part AI can't do for you. It can hand you an answer, but it can't do your reasoning. Not without taking the thing that makes you equal to the gods and handing it back to you smaller. AI feels like magic, but magic always has a price. The question isn't whether to use it. It's whether you're willing to pay the price with the part of yourself that matters most. And that's the end of this week's stoic coffee break. As always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening. Also, I would appreciate it if you would like and subscribe to this podcast. It really helps me out with the different algorithms. Also, if you haven't purchased my book, Stoicism101, I would really appreciate it if you would. You can find more about that on my website at stoic.coffee,

16:33where you can also find information about my courses and coaching programs. And lastly, if you aren't following me on social media, please do so. You can find me on Instagram and threads at stoic.coffee. And on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook at stoic.coffee. Thanks again for listening. If you could design healthcare from scratch, you want to build a system where doctors, pharmacists, and insurers don't work together. Don't talk to each other and don't even share records. You'd imagine something better, where everyone worked together on the same team. And your next doctor visit isn't a cross-town, but often right down the hall. What if a place like this already existed? At Kaiser Permanente, all of your healthcare comes together to keep you healthier and make life easier. Kaiser Permanente, a better idea for healthcare. The way we live today takes a lot of energy. Wind and solar are powerful, but not always available.

17:34That's where natural gas comes in, with reliable energy whenever it's needed. Companies like energy transfer work behind the scenes, safely transporting these resources to facilities across the country through a network of underground pipelines. Learn more at ittakesenergy.com. If you're a small business, the right hire can be maker-break. Indeed, sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.