Text in books are fixed, permanent Books represent authority. Screens are fluid, dynamic, never finished (Wikipedia is a great example). There’s no authority to tell you the truth. You have to assemble your own truth

As Donald Knuth put it: “Ai has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking …”

What do we have left that is ours and ours alone? Sensorimotor skills that are all but automatic, yes. Consciousness, yes. Emotions. Instinct. Appetites, impulses and dr... See more

That is: we don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred. A photograph says more about its creator than its subject.... See more

Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.

(William Wordsworth referred to this as “wide... See more