Generative technology has made summary and discovery incredibly easy. By summary, I mean the ability to bring together and polish ideas, and by discovery, I mean the surfacing of wisdom that has been discovered and formed throughout the centuries and milennia of human thought. With the changing tide of information and behavior, I’ve been turning over a simple question in my head–why write today?
Writing is inherently a prideful endeavor–the assumption that an author is making is that what they are writing has not been written before, or attains a special meaning by virtue of the voice from which it comes. Oftentimes, this voice is achieved through unique circumstances and stories earlier on in life: One thinks of Dostoyevsky’s time in exile inspiring his later works–the weight of Dimitri’s trials and Alyosha’s aesteicism are given substance thanks to the lived experience the author can imbue into the work. This is a type of writing which captures the extraordinary, immortalizing experiences that most people can seldom experience. The natural counter-style of this is the recording of the mundane. Writing about experiences and the current day is generally unassuming for an authors contemporaries, but those works end up forming a time capsule that is given meaning by how the understandings of the work align and differ with what comes out of history. Indeed, much of philosophy is in the idea of compression: inferring the most core truths from mundane lived experiences that are common amongst all peoples. And more often than not, the less concrete the material, the more bold the voice (Think of the great Science Fiction Authors–Asimov, Wells, and Verne–who made ungrounded predictions that seem far closer than many more “informed pundits”).
A voice is something that I worry may be taken for granted now. Generative AI has its place in boosting productivity, but by necessity, it brings a same-ness that causes the quality of output to regress to the mean. It is now easier than ever to produce average output in any domain without needing to learn and familiarize onesself with the material, but as a consequence of outsourcing intellectualism, it seems to be harder to deliver true outlier insight. The idea of a world without innovation is terrifying, but if we go too long with intellectual training wheels, that may well be where we find ourselves in. The challenge comes in handling the tradeoff between production output and production experience. In a competetive ecosystem individuals are incentivized to cut corners and produce more when given the opportunity to do so, but taken to its extreme (as it has now) results in people growing up without having developed the neuroplasticity to solve non-surface-level problems.
An interesting sentiment that a friend and I once discussed is that intelligence is equivalent to ones ability to decompress. After all, most people can compress and abstract–it is easy to look at a car and infer the high level purpose and interface (that is, to get somewhere reasonably quickly), but to go the other way round and “decompress” the idea of a fast land vehicle into the constituent transmission, engine, and associated minutiae is where intelligence is needed. That is why despite how capable LLMs are, they rarely feel intelligent: they are knowledgable, but they are not yet capable of the emergent behavior that makes humans special. It is the reason why I believe we will see a resurgence in technological minimalism, at least amongst those with the luxury to do so. And it is for this reason that I have determined it important to begin writing.
I expect that I’ll look at my thoughts in a few years and enjoy the snapshot into my thoughts at this moment in time. The high level topics that I want to write about are technology and systems that can help people live more meaningfully. This is broad enough to span interesting areas of cognition and science, while not so open-ended that I can only contribute meaningless generalities and fluff. It is important to write about the future because it is a domain that we know nothing about, yet wield tremendous influence over. It involves balancing feasibility with idealism, and so brings with it the richness that enables one speak with a variant voice while also being quite grounded and valuable long term.