>in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write
seems quite wrong to me.
If anything the trend seems to go the other way - when I was younger pre internet most communication was face to face or voice over the phone.
Now the predominant thing seems text - sms, whatsapp, this text box I'm typing into now. I saw a stat the other day that online / app dating had gone from a minority to over 50% of how couple meet. And that is mostly a combination of some photos and text. Be able to write text or fade from the gene pool!
That said long form text may be different but those who write novels and the like were always a minority.
10-15 years ago I think this take was correct, the Internet was about writing.
It isn't anymore, not for newer generations - e.g. Gen Z spending most of their time on Tiktok and phones, and not knowing how to use a word processor.
In the span of ~30 years pg is talking about I can absolutely imagine some job where you speak to the AI and it writes the documents for you and you never learned how to write one yourself. It will not be a good job but millions of people will hold it. They will not be able to write with much sophistication themselves ergo they will not be able to think with much sophistication either.
Online dating is not about writing. It was before Tinder, but it's not anymore. Like Instagram, it's about being skilled with photo filters and/or hiring a professional photographer. No one bothers to hire a profile writer - because no one reads the profile.
If the other person's photos are hawt you will click a button and the AI will send some funny jokes and if you're hawt too you'll share locations and shag. Idiocracy or some Eloi/Morlocks world will be real
Curious about your hypothesis, I went on Tiktok and clicked trending. The top thing (clips from Superstore I think) had 16535 text comments on it though mostly stuff like
>"Don't you hate Tuesdays?" "AHHHHHH"
so not really long-form essays. Maybe the future is that stuff?
TikTok videos are embedded in text -- titles, usernames, descriptions, comments. It's very different from TV, and if anything if it replaces TV it will make newer generations more literate, not less.
> It isn't anymore, not for newer generations - e.g. Gen Z spending most of their time on Tiktok and phones, and not knowing how to use a word processor.
This is a classic fallacy as old as society. “Whatever the hoi polloi are doing is by definition not the good stuff”. But long-term whatever the masses are doing always wins.
You know Shakespeare? He was the rube who thought plays could be entertaining to the masses. How quaint and silly, who would expect a commoner to appreciate a play. pfft.
Mozart? Taylor Swift of his day.
Printing press? Don’t even get me started, ew the commoners think they can just, like, write things down? How rude.
I’m as much an anti-fan of the short video communication trend as anyone, but it works. When bandwidth is cheap and video recording ubiquitous, video is a great medium. Who cares what you say, show me.
edit to add an uncomfortable truth: The in-crowd talks to develop ideas. What you see in writing is weeks, months, or even years behind the bleeding edge.
That minority only flourished for a brief period in the 20th century when universal literacy was achieved through schooling and proliferation of white collar work.
For most of history, writers were a tiny minority. It exploded 100x in the last few decades. If it goes down 10x, it's still way above where we were in the 1800s.
The issue with the modern internet is that it's primarily used for communication (via short writing), often resulting in poorly written messages. Animals communicate through sounds, but this doesn't mean they can talk.
I agree with PG on this point and have noticed that people around me are often surprised when they receive well-written wsapp/sms messages that include proper punctuation and other linguistic markers. Additionally, many people rarely engage in handwriting today, and handwriting is known to improve clear thinking and literacy skills.
I expected much more from the article.
It is, especially, poorly argumented.
I feel the author wrote it hastily.
To begin with, the following assumption is false:
>To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
>This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism.
What's the percentage of such professors ? In the university I studied, there is no case of plagiarism till today. And plagiarism is not done because professors can't write, but due to other professional factors.
>If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
As if writing is the only way to think well/correctly/effectively. My father never wrote a word: still, some of the most thoughtful statements I ever heard in my life were told to me by him during our conversations.
When you face a situation of danger, such as a wolf is running towards you: will you start to write your thoughts about what you should do, or will you just run right away and decide about the safest paths to follow while you are escaping ?
> For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
The problem with "clear thinking" is that it is subjective. I think Paul Graham and Leslie Lamport, have experienced something like this: when they sit down to write about a certain topic, they realize that their initial thoughts were not nearly clear enough, and after a number of iterations they became clearer and clearer. Most of us don't write essays, so we simply don't recognize this feeling.
That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.
Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
He developed a remarkable ability to perform complex calculations and visualize intricate mathematical concepts entirely in his mind. He once mentioned that his ALS diagnosis, which limited his physical abilities, led him to focus intensely on theoretical physics, as it required more intellectual than physical effort.
But sure, writing (and drawing) is a great tool to aid in deep thinking. So are AI tools.
I think you have understood "writing" in a very narrow sense. As mentioned in other replies, Stephen Hawking was a very prolific author. He did not write much, but he sure knew how to write.
PG is obviously talking about the mental process of writing, i.e. of organizing a complex network of thoughts in a linear hierarchy that others can grasp, not the physical one.
> That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.
You're correct here.
> Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.
As someone who teaches PhD students who are quite far beyond "average professional", I concur completely with PG on this one. Writing forces you to make very clear and concrete ideas that feel like they make sense but are still fuzzy. It's certainly not the only way, but it's the most common and easy way.
Reading and writing are essential for the transfer and percolation of knowledge across society.
Stephen Hawking's thinking and imagination wouldn't have meant much had he not finally penned them down for others to read, and neither would his ideas have been taken seriously had he chosen to make tiktoks or podcasts to explain them instead.
I think what he's getting at is that while you CAN use an AI to assist with "ideation," we will inevitably create new, low paying jobs where there is no ideation and the employee just operates an AI, because economics. That will in turn create a large cohort within society who are functionally illiterate. Literacy profoundly alters the brain for the better, and this won't happen to those people.
Very good point. I often use AI to see things from multiple points of view. It is a good tool to check if you have included obvious things in your argumentation. Spell checking is just one of those obvious things.
> But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear.
This observation of Paul Graham may generalize beyond writing: modern technology appears to turn populations into bi-modally distributed populations - for example, those that write/consume human-written prose and those that produce/consume AI-generated prose; those that can afford human medical doctors and those that can only afford to consult ChatMedicGPT or Wikipedia; those that can afford human teachers for their childrens and those that let EduGPT train them, etc. Generally speaking, I expect a trend that more affluent people will use higher quality human services and the rest has to live with automation output.
I follow Paul's argument about the consequences of the churning of low quality output by AI, but I think there's a second order effect that's more concerning. The ability to judge other people's knowledge of a subject area will become exceedingly rare and priceless.
Unlike younger generations, who are growing up surrounded by AI-generated content, many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly with people and evaluating their competence. We developed a knack for quickly determining someone's skill level through just a few minutes of face-to-face conversation—a skill that was essential for navigating various life situations.
Now that anyone can use AI to generate seemingly competent text, videos, and more, and as in-person interactions decline, the conditions that once allowed us to gauge competence are fading. I worry that in the future, no one—including AI trained on our outputs—will be adept at making these assessments.
Those of us who take time to carefully compose arguments and revise them, as Paul suggests, will have a better handle on this, so that's a helpful consideration.
I worry strongly about a future like that in Ideocracy[1], where nobody has a clue bout actually judge competence, and instead goes with the best sound bites.
The one path out that I can see, and it's unlikely, is to teach the skill of explicitly tracking history, and reviewing how well someone predicted the future, over time.
The explicit generation and curation of a reputation is part of that priceless nexus that they'll all be seeking in future generations, and yet it'll pale in comparison with the ability to size someone up in a few minutes of interaction.
Judging other's competence will only be a problem if brain-computer interfaces become widespread before AI largely replaces the competent workforce, and my money is on AI replacement coming first.
- Only a brain chip could make AI usage undetectable in practice. Without that you can tell if the person is checking his phone etc. Though you're right that an in-person interaction will be needed, otherwise there's no way of knowing what the other person is doing or if he's a real person at all... And since the latter problem (dead internet) will only grow, perhaps beyond the rectifiable, in-person communication will surely be in business again.
- Once AI replacement of competent humans has reached a certain threshold, what do you stand to gain from testing a human's level thereof? Are you interviewing for "above AI" positions? If not, relying on AI will be as normal as relying on a calculator.
> many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly with people and evaluating their competence. We developed a knack for quickly determining someone's skill level through just a few minutes of face-to-face conversation—a skill that was essential for navigating various life situations.
I think I have a bit of this knack, in some areas, tempered by an awareness of some of my blind spots, but most people don't even claim to have this knack...
As evidence from our own field: before the explosion of LLM cheating, we had the explosion of Leetcode hazing.
Because, supposedly, good experienced software developers couldn't plausibly recognize each other just by talking with each other.
So instead we whip out these douchetastic did-you-prep-for-this rituals. And afterwards you still have no idea what the other person would be like to work with (except that you now know both of you are willing to play fratbro nonsense games).
Another (albeit optimistic) possibility: today we have an informal oral culture contrasted with a formal literary culture, so Graham perceives the latter as synonymous with thinking. However, before literacy was widespread there was, on top of the informal oral culture, also a formal oral culture, so maybe with the popularity of short video clips we might see a resurgence in structured speech?
If you observe the trend speech has actually devolved with the arrival of popular internet networks. Today's elites talk in a fashion that would embarrass even their immediate parents, let alone their ancestors.
Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.
Political speech probably chases not even the median, but the marginal, voter, so you'll see that US SOTU addresses having been going regularly "Dick and Jane"-wards for the last couple of centuries.
The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase, I guess. Although I really wasn't expecting the average to go down this fast--consider the idealistic and rationally thorough political speeches of the 70s and 80s, and the way things went quickly downhill from there...
As someone said, it's no wonder The Matrix chose the 90s as the peak of human civilization.
Oral culturals often had other physical representations of thoughts in stories. The physical objects that held the stories could be women cloth or carved wood.
It may not be actual writing as much as coherent cultural transfers through objects that PG is referring to.
> I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one
It's interesting to be usually cautious but then predict something so radical, and yet with no real argument other than "AI is gonna replace us".
Painting should have been replaced by photography, but it hasn't been. In my opinion, there are still plenty of people who want to write, so there will still be plenty of people who know how to write.
And maybe my opinion is wrong, because it's an opinion. But to have to transform it to a certainty, I'd have to see much, much more data than a feeling and a conviction.
I'm not a photographer, but a musician. I won't say that musicians have been replaced by automation, but the ability of someone to earn a living from their abilities as a musician has been eroded considerably over the past century. The preservation and advancement of many musical styles is occurring primarily in living rooms, or is performed for tiny audiences of enthusiasts. I'm happy to help keep jazz alive in that way.
Writing may become the same thing. In the workplace, if someone is writing, they're probably doing it for their own entertainment. Some people write at home, writing journals, blogs, etc. Nobody will know that you're writing, unless it affects your thinking, and your thinking affects your work.
I think we already reached the stage where people stopped writing, before AI entered the picture. I rarely see anybody write a lengthy report any more. Reports have been replaced by PowerPoint, chat, e-mail, etc. One consequence is that knowledge is quickly lost. Or, it's developed by writing, but is communicated verbally.
I think of writing as similar to a linear extension of a partial order. Your brain doesn't think a single letter at a time, instead, all of your neurons are doing neuron things all at the same time. But writing is linear. This forces order and I think is partially responsible for the "clear thinking" ascribed to writing!
Hopefully I'll live the couple of decades to find out if PG's prediction is correct, I would bet against it.
Here however, I do agree with his articulation -- "writing is thinking" -- and like you, I've thought a bit about the linear nature of writing.
My view is that the "jumble" of ideas/concepts/perspectives is just that -- a jumbled mess -- and the process of linearizing that mess requires certain cognitive aspects that we (humans) generally consider as constituting intelligence. IMO, the rapid generation of grammatically-correct + coherent linear sequences by LLMs is one reason some folks ascribe "intelligence" to them.
I liked his analogy about how the disappearance of widespread physical work meant that one now had to intentionally invest Time and Effort (at the gym) to maintain physical health. The facile nature of LLMs' "spitting out a linear sequence of words" will mean fewer and fewer people will continue to exercise the mental muscles to do that linearization on their own (unassisted by AI), and consequently, will experience widespread atrophy thereof.
As someone working on linear extensions of partial orders (some of the time), I found your observation very insightful, a perspective I haven't considered before.
To add to this, when I think of ordering I’m reminded of the NP complete traveling salesman problem. It’s easy to make a program to visit all locations, but optimal order is so much harder.
I suspect thinking is similar, which brings up questions about LLMs as well. We all can now quickly write hundreds of generic business plans, but knowing what to focus on first is still the hard part.
Readit News
seems quite wrong to me.
If anything the trend seems to go the other way - when I was younger pre internet most communication was face to face or voice over the phone.
Now the predominant thing seems text - sms, whatsapp, this text box I'm typing into now. I saw a stat the other day that online / app dating had gone from a minority to over 50% of how couple meet. And that is mostly a combination of some photos and text. Be able to write text or fade from the gene pool!
That said long form text may be different but those who write novels and the like were always a minority.
(source for the dating thing - not sure how accurate but kind of scary https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1fzqgvk/...)
It isn't anymore, not for newer generations - e.g. Gen Z spending most of their time on Tiktok and phones, and not knowing how to use a word processor.
In the span of ~30 years pg is talking about I can absolutely imagine some job where you speak to the AI and it writes the documents for you and you never learned how to write one yourself. It will not be a good job but millions of people will hold it. They will not be able to write with much sophistication themselves ergo they will not be able to think with much sophistication either.
Online dating is not about writing. It was before Tinder, but it's not anymore. Like Instagram, it's about being skilled with photo filters and/or hiring a professional photographer. No one bothers to hire a profile writer - because no one reads the profile.
If the other person's photos are hawt you will click a button and the AI will send some funny jokes and if you're hawt too you'll share locations and shag. Idiocracy or some Eloi/Morlocks world will be real
>"Don't you hate Tuesdays?" "AHHHHHH"
so not really long-form essays. Maybe the future is that stuff?
This is a classic fallacy as old as society. “Whatever the hoi polloi are doing is by definition not the good stuff”. But long-term whatever the masses are doing always wins.
You know Shakespeare? He was the rube who thought plays could be entertaining to the masses. How quaint and silly, who would expect a commoner to appreciate a play. pfft.
Mozart? Taylor Swift of his day.
Printing press? Don’t even get me started, ew the commoners think they can just, like, write things down? How rude.
I’m as much an anti-fan of the short video communication trend as anyone, but it works. When bandwidth is cheap and video recording ubiquitous, video is a great medium. Who cares what you say, show me.
edit to add an uncomfortable truth: The in-crowd talks to develop ideas. What you see in writing is weeks, months, or even years behind the bleeding edge.
More going outside for you.
I think this is the article’s point - that this minority is going to shrink even more.
For most of history, writers were a tiny minority. It exploded 100x in the last few decades. If it goes down 10x, it's still way above where we were in the 1800s.
I agree with PG on this point and have noticed that people around me are often surprised when they receive well-written wsapp/sms messages that include proper punctuation and other linguistic markers. Additionally, many people rarely engage in handwriting today, and handwriting is known to improve clear thinking and literacy skills.
To begin with, the following assumption is false:
>To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
>This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism.
What's the percentage of such professors ? In the university I studied, there is no case of plagiarism till today. And plagiarism is not done because professors can't write, but due to other professional factors.
>If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
As if writing is the only way to think well/correctly/effectively. My father never wrote a word: still, some of the most thoughtful statements I ever heard in my life were told to me by him during our conversations.
When you face a situation of danger, such as a wolf is running towards you: will you start to write your thoughts about what you should do, or will you just run right away and decide about the safest paths to follow while you are escaping ?
The problem with "clear thinking" is that it is subjective. I think Paul Graham and Leslie Lamport, have experienced something like this: when they sit down to write about a certain topic, they realize that their initial thoughts were not nearly clear enough, and after a number of iterations they became clearer and clearer. Most of us don't write essays, so we simply don't recognize this feeling.
You: what nonsense. Clearly, B does not necessarily require A, and yet he says it does, how poorly argued.
Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
He developed a remarkable ability to perform complex calculations and visualize intricate mathematical concepts entirely in his mind. He once mentioned that his ALS diagnosis, which limited his physical abilities, led him to focus intensely on theoretical physics, as it required more intellectual than physical effort.
But sure, writing (and drawing) is a great tool to aid in deep thinking. So are AI tools.
PG is obviously talking about the mental process of writing, i.e. of organizing a complex network of thoughts in a linear hierarchy that others can grasp, not the physical one.
You're correct here.
> Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.
Strange example to pick as someone who did not write.
Stephen Hawking's thinking and imagination wouldn't have meant much had he not finally penned them down for others to read, and neither would his ideas have been taken seriously had he chosen to make tiktoks or podcasts to explain them instead.
You have committed the Fallacy of the Inverse.
Most of us have neither the intellect of Hawking nor his situation.
Sure some will thoughtlessly copy and paste but for many AI helps to structure their thoughts and they think clearer as a result.
This observation of Paul Graham may generalize beyond writing: modern technology appears to turn populations into bi-modally distributed populations - for example, those that write/consume human-written prose and those that produce/consume AI-generated prose; those that can afford human medical doctors and those that can only afford to consult ChatMedicGPT or Wikipedia; those that can afford human teachers for their childrens and those that let EduGPT train them, etc. Generally speaking, I expect a trend that more affluent people will use higher quality human services and the rest has to live with automation output.
It's interesting to think of humans as being like a premium service where AI's are a sort of knock-off/budget human service.
Unlike younger generations, who are growing up surrounded by AI-generated content, many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly with people and evaluating their competence. We developed a knack for quickly determining someone's skill level through just a few minutes of face-to-face conversation—a skill that was essential for navigating various life situations.
Now that anyone can use AI to generate seemingly competent text, videos, and more, and as in-person interactions decline, the conditions that once allowed us to gauge competence are fading. I worry that in the future, no one—including AI trained on our outputs—will be adept at making these assessments.
Those of us who take time to carefully compose arguments and revise them, as Paul suggests, will have a better handle on this, so that's a helpful consideration.
I worry strongly about a future like that in Ideocracy[1], where nobody has a clue bout actually judge competence, and instead goes with the best sound bites.
The one path out that I can see, and it's unlikely, is to teach the skill of explicitly tracking history, and reviewing how well someone predicted the future, over time.
The explicit generation and curation of a reputation is part of that priceless nexus that they'll all be seeking in future generations, and yet it'll pale in comparison with the ability to size someone up in a few minutes of interaction.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
- Only a brain chip could make AI usage undetectable in practice. Without that you can tell if the person is checking his phone etc. Though you're right that an in-person interaction will be needed, otherwise there's no way of knowing what the other person is doing or if he's a real person at all... And since the latter problem (dead internet) will only grow, perhaps beyond the rectifiable, in-person communication will surely be in business again.
- Once AI replacement of competent humans has reached a certain threshold, what do you stand to gain from testing a human's level thereof? Are you interviewing for "above AI" positions? If not, relying on AI will be as normal as relying on a calculator.
I think I have a bit of this knack, in some areas, tempered by an awareness of some of my blind spots, but most people don't even claim to have this knack...
As evidence from our own field: before the explosion of LLM cheating, we had the explosion of Leetcode hazing.
Because, supposedly, good experienced software developers couldn't plausibly recognize each other just by talking with each other.
So instead we whip out these douchetastic did-you-prep-for-this rituals. And afterwards you still have no idea what the other person would be like to work with (except that you now know both of you are willing to play fratbro nonsense games).
I been intentionally changing up my candor so that people
Who get caught up in the structure, lose the message
If u know you know
Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPnJXXX5Ic
As someone said, it's no wonder The Matrix chose the 90s as the peak of human civilization.
It's interesting to be usually cautious but then predict something so radical, and yet with no real argument other than "AI is gonna replace us".
Painting should have been replaced by photography, but it hasn't been. In my opinion, there are still plenty of people who want to write, so there will still be plenty of people who know how to write.
And maybe my opinion is wrong, because it's an opinion. But to have to transform it to a certainty, I'd have to see much, much more data than a feeling and a conviction.
Writing may become the same thing. In the workplace, if someone is writing, they're probably doing it for their own entertainment. Some people write at home, writing journals, blogs, etc. Nobody will know that you're writing, unless it affects your thinking, and your thinking affects your work.
I think we already reached the stage where people stopped writing, before AI entered the picture. I rarely see anybody write a lengthy report any more. Reports have been replaced by PowerPoint, chat, e-mail, etc. One consequence is that knowledge is quickly lost. Or, it's developed by writing, but is communicated verbally.
Hopefully I'll live the couple of decades to find out if PG's prediction is correct, I would bet against it.
Here however, I do agree with his articulation -- "writing is thinking" -- and like you, I've thought a bit about the linear nature of writing.
My view is that the "jumble" of ideas/concepts/perspectives is just that -- a jumbled mess -- and the process of linearizing that mess requires certain cognitive aspects that we (humans) generally consider as constituting intelligence. IMO, the rapid generation of grammatically-correct + coherent linear sequences by LLMs is one reason some folks ascribe "intelligence" to them.
I liked his analogy about how the disappearance of widespread physical work meant that one now had to intentionally invest Time and Effort (at the gym) to maintain physical health. The facile nature of LLMs' "spitting out a linear sequence of words" will mean fewer and fewer people will continue to exercise the mental muscles to do that linearization on their own (unassisted by AI), and consequently, will experience widespread atrophy thereof.
I suspect thinking is similar, which brings up questions about LLMs as well. We all can now quickly write hundreds of generic business plans, but knowing what to focus on first is still the hard part.