If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

For anyone who wants to watch, there are a few endings in similar flavors to the Blade Runner endings.

> 1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to write and read and therefore drive the decisions of the business. The remainder just do what the LLM says and eventually get automated away.

This already happens. Being the person who writes the doc [for what we wanna do next] gives it ridiculous leverage and sway in the business. Everyone else is immediately put in the position of feedbacking instead of driving and deciding.

Being the person who feedbacks gives you incredible leverage over people who just follow instructions from the final version

4. Degradation: Humans with specialized knowledge lose their specialized knowledge due to over reliance on AI, and AI degrades over time due to the lack of new human data and AI contaminated data sets.

The executives in example three seem redundant and a cost center we can eliminate.

The other day I gave GPT a journal entry and asked it to rewrite it from the POV of a person with low Openness (personality trait). I found this very illuminating, as I am on the opposite end of that spectrum.

Completely wild counterpoint, now that our docs are available to the AI bot, people are interacting with them more because when they ask the bot can reply, explain and then say "docs are available here" do the point i'm actually investing even more of my time in writing them.

I am firmly a believer very few people read anything. They don't read long things as much as they don't even read short ones. One of the things I always thought was funny was having Product Managers see there were problems with UI, then I would get tickets to add text near the problems. It always crackme up because if users didn't even barely read the button they were clicking they why would they read a paragraph nearby.

It's already affecting students knowledge. Why bother with understanding something if you can ask chatgpt to do the work?

> mind-altering drugs like Adderall

This is strange to me. You could give me 100 chances to guess which “mind-altering drug” you are thinking of and Adderall wouldn’t cross my mind. Amphetamine is a stimulant; it’s plainly not mind-altering in the way that psychedelics are. Adderall is mind-altering in the same way that caffeine is. Which is to say, it isn’t.

Do you find yourself learning from how AI structures your bullet points or rewrites messages?

I sort of feel like it would blunt the downsides of AI rewriting everything if it had to explain why it was making all the changes. Being told the rationale would allow users to make better decisions about whether to accept/reject a change, and also help the user avoid making the same writing mistakes in the future.

Do you feel weird that your coworkers must largely know that you use AI to communicate with them? I'd feel weird doing it, I know that much, so I've never even contemplated using AI for emails/communication.

Reading long form text is a big commitment in time. In a business context that's simply not appropriate. I always joke about documentation as write only content. It's the type of thing you are asked to write that then doesn't get used or read. I've more than once gotten the question whether I could produce a diagram or some sort of documentation only to realize later that after the thumbs up I got on delivery, nobody was actually doing anything with the document.

Here on HN, short comments are more appreciated than longer comments. People are skimming, not reading. The ability to say a lot with very few words is what is appreciated the most.

That's nothing new btw. As Mark Twain once wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Using LLMs to rephrase things more efficiently is a good use of LLMs. People are getting used to better signal to noise ratios in written text and higher standards of writing. And they'll mercilessly use LLMs to deal with long form drivel produced by their colleagues.

this. I am almost addicted to dropping long voice notes (pronounced rambling) and LLMs do such a great job at creating and managing these notes. I can then convert that format into anything.

although, I agree with the author since many emails and messages onlinkedin i get these days are just long post shits by AI. I am not reading them anymore but it's some other ai summarising ebcause no human talks or writes like basic ai prompting does. so so difficult to read that

> 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc.

What tool are you using for this?

I too have used LLM to do writing that, frankly, I wouldn't have done without it. Often I don't even take what it says but it helps to get the ideas out in written form and then I can edit it to sound more like how I want to sound.

>My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care.

My experience is that people who think this are really bad writers. That's fine, because most human writing is bad too. So if your goal is just to put more bad writing into the world for commercial reasons, then there's some utility in it for sure.

Might I ask what LLM you use for it to do all of that, including the visuals, so neatly?

And he was right. Poets and bard used to memorize entire epics. Writing changed this not by augmenting their abilities, but by changing expectations: it became acceptable to read form a written record, rather than from memory.

My memory gets exercised a lot less frequently than it would need to without writing.

But memory is also not thinking. It is a component in thinking, but it is not thinking itself. Discourse, arguably, though, whether in natural or symbolic language is thinking. If we offload all of that onto machines, we'll do less of it, and yes our expectations will change, but I actually think the scenario here is different than the one Socrates faced and that the stakes are slightly higher—and Socrates wasn't wrong, we just needed internal memory less than we thought once external memory became feasible, as cool and badass as it may seem to "own" Socrates in retrospect.

Drastic oversimplification of what is meant here. The core take away is writing can give the illusion of wisdom without the reality of it. True wisdom must be cultivated internally, through thoughtful interaction and lived experience—not simply consumed passively through text.

I was hoping he'd touch on how writing is "embodied" or "extended" cognition, ie how it allows for manipulation and reorganization of ideas in ways that are functionally similar to what occurs within the mind a la Clark and Chalmers' “Otto’s notebook” thought experiment (in which an Alzheimer's patient has written all of his directions down in a notebook to serve the function of his memory).

Or how the thoughts we have as we are writing shape our understanding, and so we come out with not only a written composition, but a new frame of mind; AI generated writing allows us to preserve our frame of mind—for better or worse!

There is something to be said for the ways in which coding, too, is an exercise in self-authoring, ie authoring-of-the-self.