This is my talk at AI och det goda samhället (AI and the good society), organized by the Institute for Futures Studies and WASP-HS at Norrsken House in Stockholm on 18 September 2026, translated from Swedish.
Plato
What does it mean to know something?
2,400 years ago, Plato worried about a new information technology: writing.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells of the god Theuth, who presents writing as a way to make people wiser and improve their memory.
But King Thamus replies: On the contrary. Writing will make people worse at remembering. And it will give them the appearance of knowledge without real knowledge.
They will be able to repeat things without knowing them themselves.
It sounds strangely contemporary.
Because what happens when the written word can not only be stored outside of us, but also be produced by a machine?
Knowledge as practice
What does it mean to know something?
For a bioscientist, the written word has never been the knowledge itself.
To know something about a bacterium or a virus is to be able to work with instruments, samples and data. To know when an experiment has gone wrong. To see that something strange has happened. To be able to tell what is noise and what is interesting.
The text is a way of reporting what you have found.
But what happens when the same starts to hold for the journalist? The programmer? The researcher? The student?
When the text is no longer proof that someone knows something?
The industrialization of text
What does it mean to know something?
We have already started to mass-produce text.
In the 19th century, textile production was industrialized. Production moved from the craftsman to the factory.
Now text production is being industrialized.
But the factory is not in Göteborg or Norrköping. It is in the cloud.
Text that used to be produced one piece at a time—by journalists, communicators, programmers, researchers—can now be produced on an industrial scale.
What happens then to the relation between the worker, the knowledge and the text that is produced?
The knowledge of the body
What does it mean to know something?
At the same time, something strange is happening.
It seems easier to automate much of what we have called intellectual work than what we have called practical work.
A machine can write an essay on Kant in a few seconds.
But folding a T-shirt is still a hard problem in robotics.
And to teach robots such things, we now put cameras on people who work with their hands, collect their movements, and try to teach the machines to imitate them.
What looked simple turns out to be hard.
What looked advanced sometimes turns out to be easier to imitate.
Hierarchies of knowledge
What does it mean to know something?
We have long had a hierarchy of knowledge.
Thinking has ranked above doing. Theoretical knowledge above practical knowledge. Writing a text above folding a shirt.
But AI does something strange to that hierarchy.
What we have regarded as advanced human knowledge work—writing, summarizing, programming, analyzing—turns out to be surprisingly easy to imitate.
At the same time, it is still incredibly hard to build a machine that can walk into an unfamiliar kitchen and empty the dishwasher.
So perhaps AI does not only tell us something about what machines can do.
What does it mean to know something?
It forces us to ask what we meant by human knowing in the first place.
Plato worried that writing would give us the appearance of knowledge without the knowledge itself.
2,400 years later, we have built machines that are fantastically good at producing exactly this: the appearance of knowing.
And so perhaps the really interesting question is not:
What can AI do?
But:
What does it mean to know something?
And perhaps we have valued the wrong things.