I’m dozing off at work. The last few days I’ve slept very little, because of the heat and the uncomfortable bed at my new home. It never ceases to surprise me how quickly we become accustomed to nice things, after a year with a good mattress (at my former place) I’ve lost the non-trivial ruggedness I had sleeping. This is a pattern that reaches into all faculties, and as we’re becoming cozy with AI we’re also losing a bunch of faculties.

I had to write an email to the venue where we did our company offsite two weeks ago. I forgot my keys and I need them mailed back because getting a copy is 60€. I thought about how to formulate the email like ten seconds looking at the blank screen, and then through fuck it and gave the problem to Claude “hey claude I forgot my keys at this hotel I went with the company yadda yadda” and Claude translated from casual stream of thought into a brief and polite letter. I could have generated it (slower but perhaps about the same quality), but I fear for those who have never had to formulate a request in writing, or any sort of writing. I think we will mostly forget how to do it.

Years ago I was listening to an online lecture on YouTube. The discussion was about William James, and the topic was the ideas he communicated to colleagues via letters. The lecturer said something like “this could not have happened in this era, because the era of formulating and communicating ideas by letter is gone. We simply don’t sit down a couple of hours to write a well-thought letter anymore, and even if we could it’s unlikely the receiving end has enough time and dedication to read and understand it”.

Perhaps we are the last generation to produce text from biological tokens. It’s not that we will forget how to write or speak, that we will do fine, but formulating longer texts (even if it’s just blabbering like I’m doing right now) will be out of the ordinary. The simile is transport: everybody knows how to walk, not many people will be able to walk as long and as good as our ancestors. But, we jump in a car or on a bike and we get there much faster, it’s just that we don’t walk anymore to cover longer distances.

I wonder if there is a limit to how much effort we must save ourselves from. If the body is the simile, then we ought to train our minds much like we do our bodies. To many people weightlifting or running would have seemed unfathomable. Mind training might become mainstream in the future.