Forgotten knowledge
Last week we went to Stonehenge. I hadn’t been since I was a child, when you could still walk up to the stones. We were on our way to Somerset, going along the A303, so it made sense to stop off and show our children the stones.
We walked up from the visitor centre, which takes about 30 minutes, and as you reach the crest of a hill, the stones appear in front of you. Burial mounds are dotted around the landscape on your way.
We got there reasonably early so it wasn’t too crowded and we could take photos without other people in. My youngest had fun recreating some of the suggested poses, like holding it in the palm of his hand.
But what fascinates me about Stonehenge, apart from how on earth it was built, is that we still do not know why it was built.
We did once of course. But somewhere after 1500BC the rituals and the stories behind them were lost.
We’ve been trying to figure out what Stonehenge is all about since before 1130AD, when Henry of Huntingdon wrote: “No one can conceive how such great stones have been so raised aloft, or why they were built there.”
It’s a reminder of how easy it is for knowledge to be lost.
We’ve been noticing how many stories we would think of as key to understanding our world our children don’t know. We had Bible stories drilled into us at an early age and still find ourselves singing hymns from assembly while cooking dinner. Our children have a very basic knowledge of the Christmas and Easter stories but many others have not been learned.
Our youngest had a bonus day off school for teacher training so we continued his Doctor Who education and showed him The Lazarus Experiment. Then we had to explain who Lazarus was.
It’s not just Bible stories they are missing. We realised they don’t know chunks of The House at Pooh Corner, and they haven’t watched Superman or Spiderman. You might think it’s not the greatest parenting failure but all these stories layer up and are referenced elsewhere. While reading a comic at the weekend, they suddenly recognised Garfield as one of the characters because they had just started watching the not-as-good-as-it-was-when-I-was-a-child-reboot version.
But this is the tip of the iceberg of lost knowledge. This week a new AI tool put out an advert that said: “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything — when a model can do it in seconds?”
And suddenly that slippery slope we’re heading towards got a lot, lot closer.
Why not enter a world where technology takes care of it so you don’t need to think at all? And if you do have a question, the technology will give you the answer – and you will have no idea whether or not that really is the truth, or just what the ruling knowledge gatekeepers want you to know.
We need to keep passing on stories. We need to make sure those around us and the next generation don’t forget. Because we are in serious danger of losing our grip on reality.
(The tool is called Cluely. I could have written a whole other re:writes article on the ghastly topic they chose to make their promotional video about.)
