I - Technologies of Thought
The Ancient Greek lexicon for ‘word’ was logos. It was also their word for ‘reason’, ‘speech’, and ‘language’. From that name, we have modern English ‘logic’, ‘logistics’, ‘dialogue’ and any words ending with the -logy suffix. At their core, all those things share a common thread: they come from the Proto-Indo-European root *leg-, meaning ‘to gather’ - they refer to our uniquely human capacity to ‘gather words’1, that is, to articulate language.
Until very recently, language was mankind’s most important trademark. For millennia, philosophers of all cultures discussed and argued about human exceptionality. What, if anything, distinguishes us from the rest of the universe? Are we just animals who evolved to work together with tools? Do we have a soul? If so, what is it made of? Those age-old questions often met similar answers: we are special because we can use words. Besides us, only divine creatures were thought to speak (in the beginning, was the logos). There’s something deeply divine, we all thought, about language. Intelligence, imagination, reasoning - those were the noblest parts of being a human.
For the first time ever, this belief is under challenge. While the Greek claim that words equalled reasoning comes out strengthened by the invention of Large Language Models, our human claim to exceptionality might be shattered. We have built ‘word-gathering’ machines, who already perform arguably better than the average person, and soon might even overcome experts. In this regard, LLMs represent an unprecedented technological revolution: we are building a tool that could possibly beat us at the very core of what we thought being a human was about.
Perhaps the only comparable moment in human history was, well, the starting point of history itself: the invention of writing. Writing solved a very real problem in the process of gathering words. Before its creation, you had to gather them over and over again with your memory. Suddenly, Bronze Age man could memorize a few symbols and use them as an algorithm to resurface words gathered years before, sometimes even by people long dead. The whole process became so much more efficient that the word-economy grew and suddenly there were multiple novel ways of gathering them: philosophy, theatre, algebra - can you imagine doing any of these without a clay tablet or a piece of paper?
Writing enabled more complex speeches and, therefore, more complex thoughts2. But that wasn’t at all clear from its inception. In the Phaedrus dialogue, Socrates tells his young interlocutor about the myth of Theuth - the Egyptian god who created writing. According to the story, the invention wasn’t well-received. The supposedly wiser god Thamus rebuked the discovery that would “create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories (…) they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing”.
By recounting the myth, Socrates wants to make Phaedrus aware of the shortcomings of the written word. It is prone to misinterpretation and it cannot “defend itself” when prompted by new questions. However, there lies a deep irony: we are only able to contemplate the story because his student Plato wrote it down for posterity. In many ways, Socrates’ way of doing philosophy was only passed forward because his disciples were willing to register his teachings. After them, Aristotle turned the content of his own master’s teachings into dense, logical texts, to be further studied and discussed by Neoplatonists, scholastics and ultimately nearly all of Western philosophy - “a series of footnotes to Plato”, as once described Sir Alfred North Whitehead3. Those footnotes were the way we found to circumvent the failings of writing, to give new life to ‘dead’ speeches and engage with them on their own terms.
What we today call philosophy would not have been possible without writing. But Socrates’ skepticism is not to be dismissed either. Plato wrote dialogues, attempting to merge the two conflicting paradigms of his time. Aristotle, despite his more structured texts, was a known peripatetic, speaking and talking to his pupils as they walked under the colonnades of his Lyceum. Over time, however, reading and writing gradually replaced talking as the main method for learning.
This change also had its consequences. The last couple centuries have been a period of hyper-specialisation, largely driven by increasingly complex bodies of knowledge on nearly every subject. As technical expertise became more relevant, it has largely replaced creativity and intuition as the chief target of modern educational systems. Learning evolved into an impersonal, often solitary process of studying the written word and speaking to it only within our brains. Sharing one’s knowledge on the other hand became a deeply rigorous and methodical pursuit - peer-reviewed academic papers, instead of vibe-written essays like the one you read right now. As a result, it’s not unreasonable to assume that our own thoughts must have also become more impersonal, rigorous and methodical (as did our societies). If gathering words was indeed the core human activity, then the technology of writing must have irrevocably changed what it means to be a human.
II - The Education of the Future
The writing revolution came to its conclusion only a couple centuries ago, when universal literacy was finally achieved. Yet, just a few decades later, a new technology would emerge to restore orality in the world of mass communication. Radio was arguably the most important technology to become mainstream in the first half of the twentieth century, reshaping how people consume information and paving the way for bigger political and societal changes. The widespread adoption of televisions in the post-war period further restored orality. As people around the world became glued to their screens, amusing themselves to death, hearing once more replaced reading as the chief way humans could learn and acquire information.
Those inventions gave spoken words the same privilege of letters: the possibility to be recorded and passed down to audiences without the demands of physical and temporal immediacy. In a hundred years we moved from the radio to the smartphone, and now everyone can store thousands of hours of recorded audio and video inside their pockets. We replaced newspapers with podcasts; novels with shows; poems with TikToks.
This new age of techno-orality also comes with pluses and minuses. Every now and then people are shocked by news of decaying literacy even among cultured elites. Professors complain about college students, critics complain about popular books and we often complain about ourselves, noting our own decreasing attention span and inability to focus. Even IQ scores, the most commonly used measure of literate intelligence, have started declining across most of the western world. Alarmists are ready to scream: humanity is getting dumber!
At the same time, machines are getting smarter. Intelligence is becoming too cheap to meter and LLMs can already outperform humans across many short tasks. As with menial work, most intellectual tasks performed by humans are about to be automated. Even if humans remain relevant as craftsmen or high-precision executors, most specialised skills downstream of written culture will be much less valuable than they are today.
What matters in a world where technical ability is abundant? It turns out that when you restrict your observation to groups of highly intelligent individuals, their levels of impact can still be radically different. There are tons of genius students who make it into the world’s top companies, PhD programs or quantitative trading firms. Why so few of them stand out? Ben Kuhn, who’s a researcher at Anthropic - arguably the company with the highest technical talent per capita in the world - offers a direct answer: it’s about agency and taste. Extremely successful people have a bias for action, they are relentlessly resourceful and they have an unusual intuition for picking important problems and finding elegant solutions.
Can those traits be taught en masse like technical abilities? It remains to be seen. Most so-called geniuses have historically benefited from some form of individual tutoring, where a high-skilled mentor would not only teach them specialised subject but also pass on tacit virtues like great taste and agency. Perhaps the most famous attempt to deliberately teach such traits was Philip of Macedon’s school of Mieza, set up under the guidance of Aristotle to educate the upcoming generation of Macedonian nobles, most notably Alexander and his successors who would continue the spread of Hellenism in the East Mediterranean. Much of what we today call western culture is owed Philip’s experiment in that small Macedonian hill town.
Unfortunately, we know very little about what was actually taught there. It is reasonable to think that classes were mostly conversation-driven and that students would discuss while walking, following their peripatetic leader. Aristotle was perhaps the first true polymath, venturing into topics as disparate as human biology, astrophysics, literary criticism and ethics. The education he provided to Macedonian noblemen must have been similarly broad, focused on creating powerful generalists. The most talented among them were probably able to seamlessly jump between topics, drawing new connections and ‘gathering words’ as they went, recursing to their intuition at least as much as to written text. Conducted during the transition from oral to written culture, their education was designed to produce great speakers and listeners at least as much as great readers and writers.
It is unfortunate that modern education overlooked the former in favor of the latter. We should not be surprised that students today don’t enjoy school: by prioritising technical abilities above anything else, we have deliberately alienated the most delightful aspects of learning: conversation and craft. Humans are social and active beings. We rarely experience the greatest joys by simply reading or even writing an essay or book. No, the heights of life come from the clever decisions we take, the sudden insight and idea turned into actions; and from the long talks with our friends, jumping from topic to topic, cracking jokes, drawing analogies, and slowly but surely grasping a little bit more of each other’s minds.
In the end of the day, human exceptionality does not come from any specific skill. Even our ability to use logos can be replicated. What’s unique to us are those rare instants of shared contemplation, the rush in our heads as we suddenly have a sparking insight and the need to talk and to act together with fellow humans to bring ideas to reality. An education blind to those beautiful moments might have served a certain purpose during the industrial age. But we’re already way past it.
Great human achievements await us in the future. The fastest humans ever broke their records after the invention of the car; the fittest were born after the Industrial Revolution automated manual labor; and the best chess players even use computers to practice. Unconstrained by usefulness, we became even more purposeful and effective. That’s because true human exceptionality does not lie within any specific skill. We can run, exercise, use tools, play chess, tell stories and do math; but, most importantly, we are the only beings who can do those things even when they are not useful - we can do things just because they are good.
In that sense, the education of the future has much to learn from sports. Many of the world’s most popular pastimes like football and basketball were created in the late nineteenth century and exploded in popularity as the working class moved to cities where there was little space for outdoor activity. Their leisure time was devoted to those games and soon enough people were gathering to watch their friends play, cheering for their neighbourhood teams and so on. Soon enough, sports became a fixture of popular culture around the globe.
Behind thrilling matches and cheerful crowds, there lies a deep desire, at least as ancient as the Homeric poems: the will “ever to excel and rise above others”4. What makes sports fun is their inherent competitiveness and the opportunity that players and athletes have to prove their skills. Every stadium is a temple and every game is a prayer offered on the altar of human excellence.
What few people realize is that most things we today consider useful arose from the same instincts. Ancient Greek plays were composed to be performed in competitions (as modern day movies compete for the Oscars) and Herodotus, the first historian, actually narrated his account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians to participate in public recitation and storytelling contests. The same motivation was behind many of the Renaissance’s great works and of modern enterprises and discoveries.
This agonic drive manifests perversely in modern credentialism. Today’s potential geniuses get funnelled through a system designed to drain their youth, put to work 16-hour days in law firms or hedge funds with negligible societal impact, meanwhile their rivalries reach new heights every bonus season. Their tediously rich fates give competition a bad name. But the problem lies not in the fact that they compete; it’s that they compete to be the same. Kids all over the world are subject to the same tests, have classes with the same teachers, study the same subjects at the same pace. There is very little room for individuality. No wonder they grow up to chase the same careers and to spend the better part of their youth climbing the same corporate ladders.
Fortunately, these ladders are poised to yield less and less returns. The future will prize originality and there will be much more bigger prizes to the most high-agency, and tasteful people - we already see the first glimpses of this with influencer culture. Sure, lots of bad weeds will sprawl from this change too - but they only highlight the importance of a true ‘liberal education’5 that guides learners to be truly authentic and earnest. Properly educated, the geniuses born today will be hopefully free of credentialist ladders, with faster and fairer paths to recognition and to pursuing their original goals. I can barely imagine the great innovations and cultural artefacts that will sprawl from this new Renaissance.
III - The Pursuit of Knowledge
The most important ask of this century lies ahead. Like Classical Athens demanded written philosophy, our current age demands novel technologies of thought. Failure to imagine them might lead to the atrophy of human minds. In the most dystopian outcome, we might sleepwalk into a disgusting blend of Wall-E and Idiocracy, effectively controlled by computers designed to maximize our screen time, as we alternate between online gambling, short videos and pornography. The end of scarcity, some fear, might mean the effective end of human dignity.
But things are far from lost. Sports prove that humans prefer excellence and recognition over comfort. Furthermore, innovations like aspartame and most recently Ozempic point towards a world that’s successfully adapting and overcoming the initial temptation of fast-food superstimuli6. The truth is: you don’t fight fast-food with bad food. You fight it with protein cookies, well-seasoned whole foods and other luxuries that became accessible by virtue of new technologies. Ultimately, the only way out is through. There is no going back to our pre-smartphone, pre-AI worlds anymore than we can erase frozen burgers and coke from supermarket shelves. But we can build better alternatives.
That’s why we are starting Sophinity. Our company is meant to be a lab for discovering and promoting new ways of sparking human thought. Our first product will be the app Witful - an homage to the kind of human intelligence that we want to promote. We want humans to do more than simply memorizing or performing technical computations - but to be wise, sagacious, cunning, ingenious. To promote that, we are beginning with a simple premise: a social network where learners can use AI to create quests that connect to their real interests, share and compete with friends.
From the beginning, we are leveraging the incentives that made gaming and social media so popular in the last decades: scrollable, variable rewards, proofs of work and status accumulation. Our goal is to learn from the behemoth and defeat it: at Witful, users will be given a tour of the endless world of knowledge and nudged to become fascinated with it. A user might download it to prepare for the SATs and soon find himself diving into ancient philosophy texts; another might be training for math competitions and discover a new passion for art history. They might then meet, trade their interests and start projects or communities together. Our goal is to build a sort of digital Florence, where aspiring polymaths from all over the world can meet.
Ultimately, our plan is to craft new interfaces that finally address the very criticisms drawn by Socrates against writing over two thousand years ago. The future of learning will be conversational: students will finally be able to talk to each other and to the texts and materials they create. Like in a real conversation, they will be able to jump from one topic to another, to draw new connections on the fly and to use their knowledge and references to express themselves in real-time. A user might start from a given astrological sign, or from their favorite song, or from a sentence out of a philosophy book, “and from this theme explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts”7.
In the same fashion and with the same degree of ambition as Plato’s dialogues attended to the problem of writing, we want to attend to the problem of artificial intelligence. Like him and his oral predecessors, we are philosophers at heart: seekers of knowledge. We want this quest to continue for as long as humanity stands - for infinity, if we can.
There is just one last caveat: no one can conduct this search alone. While it is technically possible to reach the upper limits of physical fitness solely through individual effort, the upper limits of intellectual fitness are restricted to those who seek them together. Not only the efforts compound, but the pleasure too: there is no greater joy than that of a great conversation with a great friend, delving into the depths of our curiosities.
Four decades ago, Steve Jobs predicted that one day, through computers, students would be able to “ask Aristotle a question” like Alexander had done. We want more than that. We want every student to have not only their own genius tutor, but their own Mieza - their own peers who will join them and keep them company in the heights and depths of their tantalising and never-ending pursuit of knowledge. May we, through this pursuit, remain exceptionally human.
The same root is also shared by the word ‘lesson’, coming from the Latin verb for reading: legere. Interestingly, the Greeks thought of ‘gathering words’ as speaking, while the Romans thought of reading.
Walter Ong writes in detail about those new ways of thought in contrast to oral cultures in his essay Writing is a technology that restructures thought.
Whitehead was also Bertrand Russell’s mentor, although his pupil had fewer positive things to say about Plato.
This is a famous quotation from the Iliad: αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων - it’s often cited as a powerful statement of the Greek agonistic spirit.
By ‘liberal education’, I mean the definition of Leo Strauss:
Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
Neuroscientist Erik Hoel warns us against superstimuli for mind:
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest concerns a video so entertaining that people who begin watching it literally cannot stop, soiling themselves. There’s a scene in which a crowd is captured by it, one by one as they enter the room and catch a glimpse of the enchanting screen, until
all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.
In biology this is called a superstimulus. It’s like a hack for behavioral reward. Baby gulls cry and peck at their mother’s mouth, which is striped in red. Lower a painted stick with stripes of the reddest red and they’ll climb out of the nest in excitement. Australian beetles are so attracted to the brown backs of discarded beer bottles that they bake to death in the hot desert sun mating with them.
Humans aren’t some miraculous biological exception. Already there are unnoticed superstimuli among us. Porn is a superstimuli, giving access to mates the majority would never see. McDonald’s is a superstimuli of umami, fat, and salt. The march of technology makes it inevitable that more and more things clear the jump to being biologically unrealistic. And so with each passing year Wallace’s prophetic description of the video it is impossible to look away from, called in Infinite Jestonly “The Entertainment,” slouches toward birth.
In other words, we intend to create a universal game to draw connections between all possible kinds of knowledge. Perhaps the best investigation on that pursuit is Herman Hesse’s last book The Glass Bead Game, whose passage I quoted.