Raw LLM Responses

In my 14 years as a second-hand bookseller, I am seeing more learned helplessness, like people being unable to focus for the few seconds necessary in order to start "navigating" alphabetical order. But what worries and saddens me is the slow loss of curiosity. A second-hand bookstore's main selling point is serendipity. By browsing up and down the shelves, you chance upon a book you didn't know you'd be interested in. But these days, people use their phones to navigate, which is narrowing their curiosity (and harming our sector's main contribution: curating serendipitous finds). **One crucial point I want to make about technology is that it is not neutral, and it is not merely a tool.** A hammer is a tool. But if I walk around with a hammer everywhere I go, you can be sure my presence will be interpreted differently. **Tools change you. It's not merely a question of whether you are using a tool well or not.** Consider literacy in the context of the ancient Greeks. When literacy was re-introduced after a 300-year "dark age" where society "regressed" into orality, the entire ethical spectrum changed. As Luc Brisson made the case in his "How Philosophers Saved Myths", when a society's language is strictly limited to orality, the level for abstract thought is narrowed. Look back at Homer's plays. They were memorized and transmitted orally. Rhyme and rhythm play a big role here as they help memorisation. Now look at a written text. You set something down on text, and you can much more easily go back to it, analyse it critically, look at individual parts of an argument. The more literacy started reasserting itself in Greek society, the more Greek society moved away from an ethics based on personified drama, where ethical concepts are seen as character traits in a dramatic narrative. Slowly, justice and prudence and wisdom and all these other virtues started being seen as autonomous concepts -- a move that was made possible by the ethical changes wrought on by the n