Writing as Nostalgia
"All that I could labor to make now grows from the barest hint"
My friend, Lev Israel, CTO of Sefaria, shares a beautiful prose-poem-meditation on what it means to write in an age of AI (see below). A question I am left with: is writing today like listening to records or cassettes? Or reading from a piece of papyrus? What happens to the meaning of old technologies—once defined by utility—when they become outdated? - Zohar
We press bodyless spirits into our service and provide them with instructions. Through complex re-arrangements of letters, we receive answers to our questions. We are retrieving an age of magic, of divination and command.
Those of us who still sit to write an essay, word by word, are allied to a former time. (Did I consult the oracle in the writing of these words? I did.)
Expertise is outmoded. There will be work in the trades, so long as we keep the advantage of our hands - a decade. And then it will only be priests, of religions old and new.
My craft has been with languages, human and machine. All that I could labor to make now grows from the barest hint. And we are only just now at the elbow of the curve. Hang on. Listen.
Will be done. My will be done. At no cost. How then will I be built? And will I will, if it is all so easily done?
The answer to your question about the continued utility of writing may depend on what the full utility of writing actually is. If its utility is solely in generating transcribed thoughts for ourselves or others to later consume, then perhaps that utility will be superseded by the new technology, just as using a calculator to generate answers to long division and square root problems superseded the method of working this out by pencil and paper. Rarely was anything tangential produced by the latter approach, other than perhaps reinforcing the mechanics of the manual approach. However, if the utility of writing is more expansive, to include potentially generating tangential thoughts in our heads that we may winnow but never if ever fully put to paper as part of the particular writing task, then that utility of writing survives in the strengthened synapses exercised by our musings while we struggle to write. And if in so musing we sense an active connection of our musings to some greater source of thought, that sensation is a special personal utility, which no use of external technology can fully replicate. Perhaps when the tool moves into our heads then something similar might be triggered, but using low bandwidth interfaces (typing or speech) to express our will and to appreciate the output may well lose something in the translation.