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

Each new wave of Knowledge Management technology raises familiar questions about what we might lose. Writing once seemed a threat to memory and understanding, much as AI does today. Revisiting Plato’s story helps clarify what changes, what endures, and why conversation still matters in KM.

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The story of Thamus and Theuth from Plato that is worth returning to. Socrates recounts it. The Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of many arts, appears before King Thamus with a new invention: writing.

Theuth claims it will improve memory. People will become wiser. They will be able to record what they know and not forget.

Thamus disagrees. Writing, he says, will weaken memory. People will rely on external marks instead of remembering for themselves. They will read widely but not truly understand. They will possess the appearance of wisdom without its substance.

It is a simple exchange. The inventor sees promise. The ruler sees risk.

Writing did change us. It shifted knowledge beyond the mind and into artefacts. It altered how knowledge travels across time and distance. From a Knowledge Management perspective, it was a foundational technology. It enabled archives, laws, contracts, science, administration. It allowed knowledge to scale.

But it did not destroy thinking. It transformed it.

Now we face a similar moment.

AI systems generate fluent answers, summarise documents, draft reports, analyse patterns. In KM terms, they accelerate the capture, retrieval, and recombination of information. And again, we hear the anxiety. Memory will erode. Thinking will weaken. We will mistake fluency for understanding.

There is substance to that concern. If we outsource judgement, if we stop questioning, if we treat generated output as authoritative, then we do diminish something important.

Yet every stage in the evolution of Knowledge Management has involved externalising knowledge in some way. Writing did it. Printing did it. Databases did it. The question is not whether we externalise knowledge, but how we relate to what we externalise.

This is where Conversational Leadership enters the picture.

Classic Knowledge Management focuses on organising, storing, and sharing knowledge. That work remains necessary. But in conditions of uncertainty, stored knowledge is not enough. We must interpret it, test it, challenge it, and apply it with judgement.

In the age of AI, answers are abundant. Judgement is not. The scarce capability is the ability to think together, to examine assumptions, to surface differences, and to reason in dialogue rather than accept what sounds plausible.

AI can generate text. It cannot take responsibility. It cannot care about consequences. It cannot sit in disagreement and work through it. That remains human work.

The deeper lesson in the story of Thamus and Theuth is not that technology is dangerous, nor that it is liberating. It is that each new knowledge technology reshapes the conditions under which we think. The task for Knowledge Management today is not simply to deploy AI tools, but to strengthen the conversational capacity through which knowledge becomes wise action.

While technology will evolve, the human responsibility to reason together will not disappear.

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