Revisiting Plato’s tale of King Thamus and Theuth to understand our concerns about AI

‍Each new technology that handles knowledge raises anxiety about what we might lose. Writing once seemed a threat to memory and understanding, much as AI does today. By revisiting Plato’s story, we can see more clearly what changes, what endures, and why conversation still matters.

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There’s a story from Plato that I’ve always liked. Socrates tells it.It’s about the Egyptian god Theuth, the great inventor, who turns up in front of King Thamus with a new invention: writing.

Theuth says this will improve memory. People will be wiser. They’ll be able to record things and won’t forget.

And Thamus says, “No, you’ve got this wrong. Writing won’t strengthen memory; it will weaken it. People will rely on marks on a page instead of remembering for themselves. They’ll read a lot, but they won’t really understand. They’ll have the appearance of wisdom without the substance.”

It’s a very straightforward exchange. The inventor sees the benefit. The ruler sees the danger.

And yes, writing did change us. It shifted memory outside of our heads. It altered how knowledge travels. But it didn’t destroy thinking. It transformed it. It made possible philosophy, science, law, administration, and whole new ways of organising society.

Now here we are again.

AI turns up, and we hear a very similar worry. This will erode memory. This will weaken thinking. This will give us fluent answers, but not real understanding.

There’s something in that concern. If we simply outsource judgement, if we stop questioning, if we treat generated text as truth, then yes, we hollow something out.

But we’ve been here before. Every time we externalise knowledge, we have to relearn what it means to understand.

And this is where Conversational Leadership really matters.

In the age of AI, answers are cheap. What is scarce is good judgement. What is scarce is the ability to think together, to challenge assumptions, to test ideas in dialogue rather than accept them because they sound plausible.

AI can generate text. But it cannot take responsibility. It cannot sit in the tension of disagreement. It cannot care about the consequences in the way we do.

So, the task now is not to compete with the machine. It is to strengthen our capacity to converse, to reason together, to exercise judgement collectively.

That, to me, is the real lesson of Thamus and Theuth. The technology will change the conditions, but the human work remains.

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