Readit Newshttps://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html
The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."
Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.
FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).
Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]
[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc
Even when something is known by "everyone", there's still going to be someone who doesn't know it yet.
I never heard about this fable before, either...
So we're just dealing with what (some) students have always done: get someone else to write the report or do the math homework. Or have parents pay a tutor to help. Or use Cliff's Notes instead of reading the book. But now it's trivially easy and free. There are no obstacles to cheating other than knowing it's wrong and self-defeating, and those are things that young people don't really have a well-developed sense about.
Then class time is reserved exclusively for doing the assignments. No phones or computers allowed.
Cue some sanguine response about how the problem is not actually a problem and something about buggy whips.
I think the article raises an important point, but is otherwise not great. It suggests continuing to relying on automation but "paying attention" while you use it. I think that's a pretty bad, suggestion actually.
I think the key to keeping ones skills up is to consciously reject automation, some significant fraction of the time. E.g. choose yourself to do 5% of your "fixed-asset accounting reports" manually, or force your subordinates to do so. Drive with the GPS off half the time.
I borrowed a car recently that didn't have the automated security features that I am accustomed to (blind-spot monitor, etc), and it was a great reminder to refresh my skills.