Two kinds of people

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

Technology always creates two kinds of people: those who use it to simplify and those who use it to go deeper.

Printing gave us both cheap sensational publications and Shakespeare. The internet gave us both viral content and new forms of philosophy.

LLMs (Large Language Models) will give us both people who will never need to think again — and people who will think more deeply than was ever possible before.

Yuval Noah Harari speaks of a divide between people with and without access to intelligence technology. But he sees it as economic and political inequality — not as a difference in how thought is produced.

In The Shallows, Nick Carr said that the internet makes thinking superficial. But he did not see the opposite possibility.

No one has said that the same technology will simultaneously create the most superficial and the deepest thinking that has ever existed. And that the distance between them will be the defining feature of the civilisation to come.