Boy oh boy, I enjoyed reading this! This is so important in the current era of LLMs making the production of narrative content so accessible.
The following were especially thought provoking:
"But what happens to writing then when chisels give way to more automatic, efficient, and accessible tools? And if it is true that certain forms of thinking develop alongside writing, then what do these developments do to our thinking at large?"
"And yet, with the informatic revolution, writing no longer retains its linearity, nor is it aimed at a particular audience. Instead, we increasingly write for an apparatus—think attentional metrics such as likes and shares, character limits that encourage brevity, “prompts” that in essence produce writing for us. Our engagement with writing is no longer sequential—rather, we must synthesize information across multivocal networks where everything is available to us simultaneously. To what extent do such changes signal not only the decline of writing itself but also the emergence of a new post-historical and post-political form of consciousness?"
"There is a symbiotic circularity here between these needs and the development of writing technologies: as our ability to communicate evolved, so too has our level of communication increased, which in turn generates demand for more advanced writing technologies."
I don't think I have the same capacity for philosophizing as you, but this makes me think about other technologies geared towards the production and consumption of text and how it may affect our ability to think.
Practically, the least technologically sophisticated form would be some kind of pen and paper situation, and the most mature would be the transformation of a prompt (by an LLM) into some text. Anyone who's used pen+paper and LLMs for this purpose would be familiar with the intimate and uniquely cognitive nature of writing my hand, and similarly with the starkly contrasted detachment of having an LLM generate prose for you.
Your post makes me think about the steps between....
How much cognitive exercise did we lose in the transition from pen+paper to typewriters? Type-writing is still an intimate activity with almost shocking demands on sustained focus by today's standards. It forces you to engage in this way, but frees you from actually constructing the individual morphological forms of each character.
And then, how much of the cognitive exercise required to typewrite was lost when text editors came along, with the ability to yeet any garbage onto the line, knowing you can go back and rearrange it? We lose the required sustained focus from typewriting, but then sure there's still the requirement to edit, rearrange, etc.... still some cognitive exercise there in refactoring a narrative, paraphrasing, etc....
But then, what about when we have things like auto completion or type-ahead to facilitate this? Okay , now we've lost the need to generate our own vocabulary out of the ether, and we get literal completions from something like a dictionary.
And then --- how much is lost when auto COMPLETION becomes auto SUGGESTION. We no longer have to "recall" what we want to write, but merely "recognize" it? Now, any sentence we write pulls from the unfathomable fan-out that is anything related on the internet that a thesaurus or LLM or semantic matcher is aware of.
And then (o god), how much is lost when an LLM does the whole thing for us (something like agentic narration).
This is all a puddle of idea, and I apologize for that. This was just an incredible thought provoking post, and I wonder how you think about the loss of value in writing in each of these layers, and a more material question --- do you recommend a reversion to one of these writing mediums for specific cases? What value do you see, for example, in pen+paper vs typing+text-editor vs LLM generating content.
Separately, do you think there are opportunities for LLMs to unobtrusively enhance the writing process and make it more introspective? Sometimes I'll have an LLM provide an editorial review of my content, but I've seen mixed results and find myself adopting maybe 10% of the review.
chiply•1h ago
The following were especially thought provoking:
"But what happens to writing then when chisels give way to more automatic, efficient, and accessible tools? And if it is true that certain forms of thinking develop alongside writing, then what do these developments do to our thinking at large?"
"And yet, with the informatic revolution, writing no longer retains its linearity, nor is it aimed at a particular audience. Instead, we increasingly write for an apparatus—think attentional metrics such as likes and shares, character limits that encourage brevity, “prompts” that in essence produce writing for us. Our engagement with writing is no longer sequential—rather, we must synthesize information across multivocal networks where everything is available to us simultaneously. To what extent do such changes signal not only the decline of writing itself but also the emergence of a new post-historical and post-political form of consciousness?"
"There is a symbiotic circularity here between these needs and the development of writing technologies: as our ability to communicate evolved, so too has our level of communication increased, which in turn generates demand for more advanced writing technologies."
I don't think I have the same capacity for philosophizing as you, but this makes me think about other technologies geared towards the production and consumption of text and how it may affect our ability to think.
Practically, the least technologically sophisticated form would be some kind of pen and paper situation, and the most mature would be the transformation of a prompt (by an LLM) into some text. Anyone who's used pen+paper and LLMs for this purpose would be familiar with the intimate and uniquely cognitive nature of writing my hand, and similarly with the starkly contrasted detachment of having an LLM generate prose for you.
Your post makes me think about the steps between....
How much cognitive exercise did we lose in the transition from pen+paper to typewriters? Type-writing is still an intimate activity with almost shocking demands on sustained focus by today's standards. It forces you to engage in this way, but frees you from actually constructing the individual morphological forms of each character.
And then, how much of the cognitive exercise required to typewrite was lost when text editors came along, with the ability to yeet any garbage onto the line, knowing you can go back and rearrange it? We lose the required sustained focus from typewriting, but then sure there's still the requirement to edit, rearrange, etc.... still some cognitive exercise there in refactoring a narrative, paraphrasing, etc....
But then, what about when we have things like auto completion or type-ahead to facilitate this? Okay , now we've lost the need to generate our own vocabulary out of the ether, and we get literal completions from something like a dictionary.
And then --- how much is lost when auto COMPLETION becomes auto SUGGESTION. We no longer have to "recall" what we want to write, but merely "recognize" it? Now, any sentence we write pulls from the unfathomable fan-out that is anything related on the internet that a thesaurus or LLM or semantic matcher is aware of.
And then (o god), how much is lost when an LLM does the whole thing for us (something like agentic narration).
This is all a puddle of idea, and I apologize for that. This was just an incredible thought provoking post, and I wonder how you think about the loss of value in writing in each of these layers, and a more material question --- do you recommend a reversion to one of these writing mediums for specific cases? What value do you see, for example, in pen+paper vs typing+text-editor vs LLM generating content.
Separately, do you think there are opportunities for LLMs to unobtrusively enhance the writing process and make it more introspective? Sometimes I'll have an LLM provide an editorial review of my content, but I've seen mixed results and find myself adopting maybe 10% of the review.