There’s a lot of work remaining to be done, and if you want to be successful you must devote all your waking hours and all your efforts to the task personally. This is not something that admits of delegation.
. . .
A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXVII
I recently read a P. G. Wodehouse novel for the first time, and I don’t think any other book has made me laugh out loud while reading to myself the way his did. Anyone who appreciates British humor would enjoy his works. While reading Thank You, Jeeves, however, I was struck by the way that Bertram Wooster relied on Jeeves to fill in gaps in his knowledge of quotations. Shakespeare, the Bible, other cultural references: Jeeves proved himself a wealth of knowledge pertaining to these subjects and quick to help Wooster fill in the blanks in the moment:
“Oh? Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…” I stepped to the door. “Jeeves,” I called down the passage, “what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?”
“Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.”
“Thank you, Jeeves. Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,” I said, returning.
—P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves
Separately, I’ve been working my way through Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic as part of a philosophy book club. This is really my introduction to Stoic philosophy, and it’s been very eye-opening and inspiring. Here’s the tie-in: in Letter XXVII, Seneca relays the story of a man whose “memory was so bad” that he had to take similar measures to Wooster, yet even more drastic:
But this didn’t stop him wanting to appear a well-read man. And to this end he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves, one of them to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod . . . He would have these fellows at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets which he might repeat to the company . . . Sabinus was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXVII
The human tendency towards laziness manifests itself in the persistent desire to offload our work—to externalize it. I keep a to-do list so I don’t have to memorize what I need to get done throughout the day. Wooster had Jeeves as a personal valet to help with much more than just remembering quotations. And Sabinus had, by Seneca’s account, at least eleven slaves to memorize and recall the works of specific authors for him.
But it’s that last line that stands out the most to me: he “was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally.” And herein, I think, lies the risk of artificial intelligence, particularly the chatbot-style large language models like ChatGPT that so many are interfacing with today: with so much information at our beck and call, we no longer feel the need to retain that information ourselves, in our own minds. We can just ask our personal valet, our eleven slaves, our ChatGPT what was it Shakespeare or Homer said, or how to solve this or that sort of problem, or who such and such was.
I think Seneca would agree with me that this easy access to so much information—and not just information now, but problem-solving, too—weakens the mind and quickly becomes a crutch. What if one finds oneself without access to the Internet, or without one’s smartphone? What if one finds oneself in a bind without Jeeves by one’s side to concoct an elaborate solution to the problem? Suddenly, the curtain is pulled back and the lack of knowledge revealed plainly, and like Sabinus, we become ripe for the picking-on. The real problem is that we can delude ourselves into thinking that we’re smarter than we actually are: we can become convinced that what ChatGPT knows we know personally.
This is not to say that artificial intelligence doesn’t have any benefits. Certainly, there is benefit to offloading certain information or tasks: we each have our own strengths and proficiencies, our own areas of interest and expertise, and I think it’s wise to lean on others when it comes to scenarios outside of our own wheelhouses. In such situations, leaning on ChatGPT can be a boon, a timesaver, and a smart strategy. But it’s important to be able to discern when you’re leaning on others’ strengths versus outsourcing your own abilities.
I’m admittedly a late adopter and something of an AI pessimist. But I like to look at LLMs as a tool—a tool that we’re still actively trying to create and refine, mind you. And if ChatGPT is the hammer, I’m still trying to figure out what the nail is. In the meantime, I’d prefer to focus on building my own skills and proficiencies. I’ll end with an admonition from Seneca to utilize the capabilities of our own minds to create valuable works:
It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook [or his favorite AI agent] . . . What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXXIII