How does that compare to the population of people who memorize the Old testament or the Quran?
I remember hearing that the entire epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey we're all done via memorization and only spoken... How do you think those poets memories compared to a child who reads it Bob the builder books?
For those who don't get the reference, Plato thought that the written word was not a good tool for teaching/learning, because it outsources some of the thinking.
Simiarly (IIRC) Socrates thought the written word wasn't great for communicating, because it lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication.
I wonder if they ever realised that it could also be a giant knowledge amplifier.
They probably did, but still preferred their old way since it took more skill.
I remember some old quote about how people used to ask their parents and grandparents questions, got answers that were just as likely to be bullshit and then believed that for the rest of their life because they had no alternative info to go on. You had to invest so much time to turn a library upside down and search through books to find what you needed, if they even had the right book.
Search engines solved that part, but you still needed to know what to search for and study the subject a little first. LLMs solve the final hurdle of going from the dumbest possible wrongly posed question to directly knowing exactly what to search for in seconds. If this doesn't result in a knowledge explosion I don't know what will.
We already know how oral cultures work: they use technologies such as rhyme, meter, music, stock characters, memory palaces, and more. If you want a good example of how powerful this stuff is, think about the last time you had a song stuck in your head.
