Since the turn of the century, technology has progressed at an unprecedented rate. The beginning of the third millennium was marked by many events. The explosion of the internet in the preceding decade had laid the foundation for advancement in many different aspects.
In a century of many great and pivotal inventions the internet is perhaps the most far-reaching one in its effects. Not only has it shaped major things such as laws and policies, it has also affected our lives to the most individual level. Redefining the manner in which we interact with our environment and in some ways it has reconstructed what that environment is.
Perhaps the internet's greatest effect is the near elimination of inconvenience. As every form of service provision made its presence in the online space, everything became more convenient.
Buying or renting hard copies of films or games is redundant when a soft copy can be bought quicker, the ultimate convenience in terms of both time and required effort of modern technology inadvertently trumps all that preceded it.
This new world has since evolved into a completely new one. The recent AI boom has entirely reshaped everything. Where the internet redefined how we interacted with the world and each other, AI has redefined how we interact with the internet as a whole.
Whereas many would and in a sense should laud the scientific achievements that are artificial intelligence and machine learning and the many horizons that they've opened up. The convenience they now offer is strikingly similar in its effects to that of the internet and social media boom.
After much of the world moved into the online space, the convenience it offered inadvertently led to the decline of the third space. The third place or third space refers to the social surroundings separate from the two usual, predominantly work and home. The claim of connectivity bringing people together has led to less physical interactions which has been one of social media’s leading criticisms.
Similarly, artificial intelligence has pushed the envelope of convenience even further, but the damage it has brought has been unprecedented. Recent headlines have been filled with news of thousands of people being fired and replaced with some version of AI. The socio-economic impact this is to have cannot be understated, but another understated area is how it affects the person.
In October of 2024, computer scientist Paul Graham penned an essay titled Writes and Write Nots. In it Graham wrote of a fear that the over-reliance on AI built on how we rely on it to do some of the tasks could lead to a loss of intellectual skills.
Graham focuses on the skill of writing. As writing involved a lot of thinking, writing became a catalyst for the practice of thinking. Those who couldn't write had to either resort to the unsavoury act of plagiarism or, for those in the public space with resources and funds, simply pay someone else to do it.
With the advent of AI this is no longer necessary, in fact as Graham pute it, thinking in the writing space is not necessary.
“Writing is thinking. In fact, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
So, a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.” warns Graham.
Whilst Graham focuses on writing it is important to note that AI hasn't. Another great example is in learning the basics of computer science, AI can easily generate any basic fundamental code in any prompted coding language. The problem this raises is that it makes it redundant for students to learn these codes. Writing code, similar to writing, is an act that involves thinking.
This isn't entirely new, skills have been lost to technology and convenience in the past. Where most people could churn butter in pre-industrial Europe, most now don't know what it means as butter exists packaged and ready to use at the aptly named convenient stores.
Further down in his essay Graham denotes this again with another example. That perhaps scarily marks our present situation.
“This situation is not unprecedented.” He writes. “In preindustrial times, most people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be.
It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.”
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