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

I think Sinofsky is asking a question: what does the future look like given that (a) writing is thinking but (b) nobody reads and (c) LLMs are being used to write and read.

It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points.

Some plausible (to me) possibilities:

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.

2. Augmentation: Thinking is primarily done by humans, but augmented by AI. E.g., I write my thoughts down (maybe in 5 bullet points or maybe in paragraphs) and I give it to the LLM to critique. The LLM helps by poking holes and providing better arguments. The result can be distributed to everyone else by LLMs in customized form (some people get bullet points, some get slide decks, some get the full document).

3. Transformation: Maybe the AI does the thinking. Would that be so bad? The board of directors sets goals and approves the basic strategy. The executive team is far smaller and just oversees the AI. The AI decides how to allocate resources, align incentives, and communicate plans. Just as programmers let the compiler write the machine code, why bother with the minutiae of resource allocation? That sounds like something an algorithm could do. And since nobody reads anyway, the AI can direct people individually, but in a coordinated fashion. Indeed, the AI can be far more coordinated than an executive team.

The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect.

I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment.

Worth a watch.

The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI.

Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a summary of his 30 page corporate memo and ask it questions.

I repeat: that people do not read is not a new problem, nor is it made one iota worse by AI.

Just watched Veritasium's "How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

Inventions created for convenience decades ago have now become health concerns. I wonder how AI might affect our intellectual well-being in the decades to come.

In my experience people don't read these large documents because they are not personalized/relevant. When you're writing to a large audience, you naturally assume people know the least amount possible about the subject and start from there. In a corporate setting this comes off as irrelevant or boring. I'm sure rebranding initiatives like One Microsoft, Copilot, or Office 365 makes things simpler for executives but employees are left confused. The memo usually mentions future efficiency gains or synergies but will omit why this brand change is needed. Surely if you're sending a memo to 100k people, it makes sense to not talk about negatives (a good example of this is politicians) but at that point the value of memo is also very low. This may come off as odd but short format videos seem to work much better at large scale. Perhaps the future of communication is really just lots of easy to consume/repeated content.

I think it's the type of thing that the mere awareness of it counts a lot to counterweight the problem.

It's like when you are growing up and a certain type of behaviour that would work for socializing when you're 14 years old suddenly doesn't work anymore when you are 21. You learn about it when someone you trust brings you attention to it and suddenly you have the opportunity to reflect and change your behaviour.

The thing with AI that I really fear is the same with mind-altering drugs like Adderall. In some places you just can't afford the luxury of not using it without losing competitiveness (I think, never used it but I know of people that do with regularity).

So maybe we don't want to not read what we write, but sometimes there is a middle manager making you do it. Then it's a problem of context that awareness in itself doesn't help, maybe only in the long run.

Idk, I'm more optimistic than the author.

I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes ~20 pages of rambling text by a professional coach // amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends and they all love the new style. Even the ones who hate the gym.

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

Hubert Humphrey (VP US) was asked how long it would take him to prepare a 15 minute talk: "one week". Asked how long to prepare a two hour talk? "I am ready right now".

I use AI a ton for writing emails and other corporate stuff, I have no problems there, it structures and presents them well enough and quickly that it saves me a ton of time.

Where I am conflicted is creative writing -- its something I have been interested in but never pursued...and now I am able to pursue it with AI's help. There is a degree of embarrassment when confiding to folks, that yes a piece was AI assisted... see here by what I mean: https://humancurious.substack.com/p/the-architect-and-the-cr...

Putting aside the people who need LLMs as a prosthetic, the only writers who are asking AI to write lengthy prose for them are the ones who on that occasion didn't have anything important to say in the first place. Maybe they work a fake job where they're required to do ritualistic writing, similar to the medieval scribes who laboriously copied books by hand over and over again. Now, thanks to AI, they're liberated from having to toil through that lengthy process. So, yes, writing is thinking. It's also willpower. But if the purpose for it didn't matter in the first place, then nothing is actually lost if you stop doing it. You just won't get punished.

The title (subtitle, to be precise) is almost completely unrelated to the content.

Title is about AI. Content is just rambling on how people dislike reading business reports.

If writing is thinking I think the author is having a trouble thinking coherently.

To me, the short answer is we collectively stop learning.

I'll take the flip side of the argument and say AI allows humans to get back to raw, first-principals research and writing.

In many ways, middle men of literature (i.e. re-bloggers, article writers, etc) are moot. Groups who don't actually add value but have insane amount of ads on the page. This pushes people to actually write original content.

Is this perfect? no way. Is it dangerous? yes.

There are so many problems, but for better/worse, too many of us have changed the way we operate. It's here to stay.

Fun fact: Socrates thought writing would lead to forgetfulness. https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

Then nothing is being learned by AI (yet due to LLM being prefabbed but not dynamic) or human.

I dont use LLMs at all for writing. Mainly for checking stuff and the most boilerplate of code.

every once in a while everyone should watch Jonathan's Blow: Collapse of Civilization [0]

by not reading and going through docs - we cut out our critique ability as we just ingest fully what A.I gives us. by not writing we don't exercise thinking - question our assumptions etc. since what AI writes will mostly be positive not negative.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&pp=ygU1cHJldmVud... and just like that society stops thinking. stops creating.

then civilization collapses.

This is on par with “when did you stop beating your wife?” I wish people would stop thinking logical fallacies are clever.

People do not read, not even short things. Never did. Luckily I am old and senior enough, that when I receive a Teams invite to 'go over the email/doc together' to just say 'nope' and decline as I know they basically want me to read it to them.

"My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read."

The myth is that the culture at Amazon is contrary to that. Is that true?

I definitely feel like writing clarifies my own thoughts and helps me find inconsistencies or other problems with what I think I want to say. If everyone is letting the LLM do most of the work writing and reading, their thought process and eventual conclusions are definitely going to be strongly influenced by that LLM. A great justification for the alignment efforts I guess, or a great opportunity for to propagandists.

Writing has always been my way of thinking things through. Sometimes I use AI to help with writing, and it does save effort. But over time, I’ve noticed that many of the ideas I should’ve taken the time to untangle myself just get skipped. The words are there, but it feels like I’ve missed the chance to really have a conversation with myself.

Writing is not thinking just as calculating is not "doing math".

We've invented the equivalent of a "calculator for words" and we're going through the growing pains of discovering that putting words together is a separate activity from thinking. We've never needed to conceptualize them as separate activities until now so we don't have the conceptual distinction and language to even describe them that way.

Potentially related - "I'd rather read the prompt" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803

Writing is not thinking. It’s similar to cutting through the jungle. With a pocket knife. And at the end you realize that you’re still at the very beginning. :)

Writing and reading is similar to writing and talking. Multitasking but in reality it is switching between both of them. Really fast switching, but it is not a real parallelism.

It’s interesting that people are beginning to question the standard narrative for thinking in our minds

This for example is fascinating https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE?si=WmqTH-DONchvlJjE

These are the infinite monkeys at typewriters with an effective culling algorithm. There needs to be no thought to get useful output "written".

Sounds like a problem! Good luck solving it.

Is the post some sort of series? I will be looking forward for the part that addresses possible solutions.

Lots of confusion about what Steven is saying here. I'm pretty sure his point is: A) People don’t actually read deeply in corporate and professional contexts, even pre-AI, and B) AI compounds the issue because it both creates vast quantities of content and is increasingly being relied upon to summarize that content, So: the implication is that a loop of low quality reading and writing is compounded. Basically: If writing is thinking, and people rarely read carefully even without AI, then the widespread adoption of AI, both as writer + summarizer may very well push orgs into cycles of shallow understanding and misinformation at large.

Personally: All my best business has been done in front of a whiteboard.

AI talking to AI will be the dominant form of communication

PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER THINKING

Then AI is thinking. Next question.

The next few decades of humans grasping for existential meaning at the level of Camus, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, and being left empty because there’s nothing is going to be interesting.

We’re already seeing the regression to the mean, which is basically fanatical clinging to myths and historicism that favors whatever period or place favors the lifestyle they personally want.

No thinking

Thinking is thinking. There is no substitute.

Writing isn't necessarily thinking. For example you can have a spreadsheet of 20 000 words and use an algorithm to randomly pick a sequence of words. No one would call that thinking, even if such a process made intelligible sentences sometimes.

"AI" is using an algorithm and statistics in the same way---it's just more accurate at making intelligible sentences than the example above. I wouldn't call either thinking, would you?