A few times now, I have heard people bring up Socrates’ suspicion of writing in the context of the impact of AI on learning. As a defense of AI, the point is that people (even wise people like Socrates) have long been concerned about the impact of technologies on the human mind, and in hindsight these concerns usually look silly.

AI fears may be partly a moral panic. Still, AI is having an impact on learning in specific and undeniable ways. ChatGPT can write an essay better than many high school and university students, it seems, and many students are all too happy to outsource their essay writing–and critical thinking–to it. Teachers are struggling to prove that essays have been written by AI, and so the value of the whole rigmarole of essay writing and grading seems to be in question.

Socrates thought that dialogue was superior to reading and writing for the development of the mind. In 2026, when everything is being thrown into question, this old idea might have fresh salience. In the same way that calculators made mental math (somewhat) obsolete, maybe LLMs, essentially information regurgitation machines, have made this standard part of education obsolete also. Should classrooms return to the Socratic method of education? I have to admit I love to imagine it, and I probably would have liked for my own education to have included more open-ended dialogue and less information regurgitation.

I can’t say exactly how this would work and scale. One benefit of written essays is that they can be graded en masse. Maybe traditional grading systems will also have to be reworked in response to the AI disruption. What I do believe strongly is that nothing should be off the table.