The Thinking Machine (PART I)

Mario Mahecha, Santiago Guzman, Santiago Aristizabal, Roy Riascos.

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Part I: The Long History of Thinking Tools (Lessons from past fears)

This special series of blogs spans the next weeks, exploring the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence with particular attention to its role in radiology.

For months, many of us have debated whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents something entirely new or simply the latest chapter in a long history of cognitive tools. Similar fears and hopes accompanied writing, printing, calculators, and the internet. Each time, critics predicted decline. Each time, the outcome proved more complex.

Before drawing conclusions about AI, we will first look back: What were people afraid would be lost? What actually changed? And what expanded instead? Understanding those earlier transitions may help us better interpret the moment we are living through now.

“Yesterday’s scholar meets tomorrow’s mind.”

Writing: The Fear of Forgetting

The concern that writing would weaken memory appears explicitly in Plato’s Phaedrus (274c–275b), in the myth of Theuth and Thamus. There, King Thamus warns that writing will “produce forgetfulness,” because people will rely on external texts instead of exercising memory, gaining only the “appearance of wisdom.” (1)

Scholars later described this moment as a shift from oral to literate cognition. While writing reduced the need for total memorization, it enabled durable law codes, philosophical treatises, and cumulative scientific records. Memory practices changed, but structured reasoning and large-scale coordination expanded.

The Printing Press: The Fear of Overload

With the spread of the printing press in 15th- and 16th-century Europe, concern shifted from memory to excess. Humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus remarked on the “swarms of new books,” reflecting anxiety that the rapid multiplication of texts would overwhelm readers and make it harder to distinguish truth from error. If manuscripts had once been scarce and carefully transmitted, print suddenly created abundance. (2)

Yet historians of print culture have shown that this same abundance encouraged new intellectual habits: systematic comparison of texts, the use of indexes and reference works, and more stable editions that could circulate widely. Print did amplify polemic and misinformation, but it also strengthened the foundations of scholarly debate and early modern science. The central cognitive task changed, from preserving rare knowledge to organizing and evaluating plentiful information.

Calculators: The Fear of Losing Fundamentals

When handheld calculators became widespread in the 1970s, educators worried that students would lose fluency in mental arithmetic and basic computation. If machines handled calculations instantly, would foundational skills, and even mathematical thinking itself decline? (3)

Research over the following decades suggested a more nuanced outcome. Meta-analyses found that calculator use, when integrated thoughtfully, did not reduce overall achievement and often improved problem solving performance. Curriculum standards increasingly emphasized that technology should support conceptual understanding, not replace it.

Routine manual computation became less central, but instruction shifted toward modeling, interpretation, estimation, and conceptual reasoning. Calculators reduced procedural effort while allowing students to engage with more complex and applied mathematical problems.

The Internet: The Fear of Shallow Attention

With the rise of the internet and search engines in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, concern shifted toward attention itself. Writers such as Nicholas Carr argued that constant connectivity and instant retrieval might fragment concentration and erode deep reading. If answers are always available within seconds, would sustained focus and reflective thought decline? (4)

Empirical research has shown that digital environments can influence reading patterns, often encouraging skimming and nonlinear navigation. At the same time, the internet dramatically expanded access to information, enabled rapid cross-disciplinary learning, and made real-time collaboration possible across geographic boundaries. Memory work shifted from storing facts internally to knowing where and how to find them efficiently.

Artificial Intelligence: What Is Happening Now?

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a tool that operates directly within domains traditionally associated with reasoning. Unlike earlier technologies that stored information or automated calculation, contemporary AI systems can generate language, summarize research, translate, write code, analyze data, and model complex systems.

Recent developments go further. Large language models are now embedded in applications that can browse the web, call external tools, and in some cases act as semi-autonomous “agents” capable of interacting with digital environments, opening files, organizing information, or executing multi-step tasks on a computer. The tool is no longer limited to producing text; it can participate in workflows.

Across education, medicine, finance, and research, AI reduces the time required to perform tasks that once demanded sustained manual effort. Its outputs, often fluent and persuasive, require careful evaluation and human oversight.

AI now occupies a space closer to language, decision making, and execution than many previous cognitive tools. Whether this represents a transformation in kind or a continuation of historical patterns of adaptation will be examined in the second part of this discussion.

References: 

1. Werner DS. Theuth, Thamus, and the Critique of Writing. In: Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge University Press; 2012:181-235.

2. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010.

3. Ellington, Aimee J. “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Calculators on Students’ Achievement and Attitude Levels in Precollege Mathematics Classes.” Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, vol. 34, no. 5, 2003, pp. 433–63. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/30034795. Accessed 20 Feb. 2026.

4. Betsy Sparrow et al. ,Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.Science333,776-778(2011).DOI:10.1126/science.1207745