I will continue to write every post by hand, as I have done since December 28, 2009. Others will use newer technologies to create written content. There are several reasons to write by hand, and the most significant to me is that writing requires you to think, so I appreciate the slower pace of handwriting as opposed to typing.
While most people type, others go even further and create content without writing it themselves. They outsource the entire thought process to technology. While the resulting content may be valuable for the reader, it doesn’t provide the “writer” with any benefit, so there isn’t really any form of communication happening. Instead, a person feeds an algorithm a prompt, then pastes the response somewhere for other people to read. The ideas this person shares are not their own, even if they agree with what the algorithm says. There is no thought or creation involved in this.
Another reason why I prefer the slower pace of writing by hand is because writing is about more than sharing your ideas with others. Writing organizes your knowledge, and this process often surprises me by providing an insight lurking beneath the surface of my consciousness. Throughout the history of humans, the names you know are people who read, write, and speak.
The Western canon was scribbled first on parchment, at a time where only the erudite or privileged would have access to wisdom documented over the ages. Some people, like monks, clergy, or scholars, chose occupations that allowed them to read and learn, and in some cases, write or transcribe works for the few libraries that existed. It wasn’t until the 14th century that Johannes Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, which made the written word available to the masses. What followed was the Renaissance, a surge in human knowledge and culture and people throughout Europe and the Middle East began reading voraciously. Reading led people to create new ideas and inventions, which they could more easily share through new written works. Content produced by AI cannot create anything new because tech platforms only know what humans have already created and taught to them.
Today, our artificial intelligence platforms can recite the entire Western canon and everything that followed it, but it doesn’t understand human culture, or even the meaning of words. Artificial intelligence is a parlor trick. Algorithms use large language models to guess the next word in a string, allowing it to answer questions. Reading a book is something altogether different than asking artificial intelligence to explain the themes in Dante’s Inferno or Homer’s Odyssey or Shakespeare’s Othello. An algorithm cannot understand the concepts of a journey, homesickness, inner conflict, love, rage, jealousy, or deceit, so it will always fall short in communicating on a deeper human level. Even more contemporary works like Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Wallace’s Infinite Jest are beyond the grasp of AI, which cannot relate to human emotion or the adventure and struggle of being alive.
These works are part of the humanities—or should I write humanities—and some of them have come under attack in recent times for being too narrow-minded, failing to represent every human viewpoint, or having outdated ideas about the way human culture functions. This criticism misses the point. Our morals and wisdom are found in these works. These books describe universal truths about the human experience that all of us can understand and empathize with. They are important parts of our history and records of how our culture once existed. They also remind us that, despite how different life is today, we have certain things in common with people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Editing My Writing
I use an app to help me remove unnecessary words from my writing. It doesn’t do the work for me, but it shows me where the problems are, requiring me to edit each sentence myself. After that first attempt to edit an article, I use Word’s spelling and grammar check. If I am writing something important, I use a single prompt to have GPT act as an editor. The prompt I use has GPT create a table of missing words, bad spelling, bad grammar, and syntax problems. I also ask it to explain the error so I can try to avoid it in the future. After that, the editing work falls not just to me, but also to my human editor, Christina, who edits my already edited work. I will not allow GPT to edit my work directly because it makes changes, some of which I would never write, and other times it adds or subtracts from the text in ways I don’t agree with.
My fear is that this new and exciting technology will make people lose the ability or will to read and write, and in doing so, many will end up dependent on technology. This will be to their detriment and society’s, especially because our democracy requires educated citizens. When people outsource their thinking to AI and other technology, we all lose.
Technology Makes Things Easier
Our technologies make things easier for us. For example, my car is a technological marvel. It keeps me safe, often by making its own decisions. When it comes to writing, typing on a computer is easier for me than typing on a typewriter because I am a terrible typist. You and I are surrounded by technologies that neither of us would give up. Our lives are comfortable.
However, there are certain tasks you don’t want to be easier. For example, if you work out, you do so because you want the benefits of exercise, including a long and healthy life, one that has you mobile and cogent into your late 90s. Getting these benefits requires effort, so the exertion is worthwhile.
Reading requires effort, as does writing. Speaking, which is enabled by reading and writing, also requires effort. Thinking is difficult, and it relies on reading, writing, and speaking. We already live in a world where technological algorithms make decisions for us. Predicting the future of these algorithms makes it seem likely that they will reduce the amount of work we have to do, including work we are better off doing ourselves.
Why I Continue to Write by Hand
A detrimental reliance on technology for thinking and writing is evidence of a fixed mindset, which is rigid and unable to process new information. By contrast, a growth mindset is one that has you believing you can improve your intelligence, abilities, and talents through your effort. I am not opposed to using technology, including artificial intelligence. I attended Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Summit in New Your City in 2011. I believe AI has the possibility to change our lives for the better, and I am optimistic. You and I want AI to grind away on cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other health problems, to find connections in huge volumes of data far more easily than any human undertaking could match.
I will continue to write by hand because I believe doing so is important to thinking and communicating well. Soon, I will release a development program built on reading important books and continual learning, writing, and note-taking to improve your knowledge base and your communication.
