i have a prediction about the future

Hey you beautiful people! Today at work, I was digging through my inbox and clearing out emails. I noticed almost invariably, some people had succumbed to the use of AI to write an email.

I am not exactly an astrologer type person, who likes to predict things and then circle back past-future loops. But I have a prediction to make and I have a good instinct about this. In under a decade, a lot of people won’t be able to write.

By writing I mean, actual writing of your thoughts and ideas. Today, using chatGPT, almost everyone has been doubling down on the ‘writing’ use case to make an email better, a text better, any sort of communication better. Heck I saw some authors writing novels using AI.

Here are my two cents on this:

Writing is not merely an act of putting down words, it is the skill of navigating your thoughts into a clear sentence. Its almost as good as thinking. You have something you have understood, writing and talking are the only two forms of communicating it. While writing, there is a broad cloud of understanding you have in your mind, you now have to carefully curate the best set of words to explain the concept which you have understood. The people who write beautifully are people who have understood the subject matter precisely.

These days, fundamentally, many people struggle with writing. Sometimes when I read a book and I explain what I understood from the book, talking about it VS writing it has a wide gap of contextual understanding. Paul Graham says that the more prestigious the job you have, the more writing it tends to require because you need to think more clearly.

Until AI, there was no other way to explain something. Yes you could pay someone to write for you, but that too was a barrier to cross. Right now with AI, the barrier is ZERO. If AI can write literally everything for you, why would you write? And if you are not writing, you are not thinking. The AI cannot think for you. AI has blown this world open to write. Even to write a small email, to share your thought, to give an update, people are going to use AI.

The consequence? People will forget articulation and will forget to write, to form right sentences. Right now: there are good writers, bad writers and people who can’t write. In the future, there would just be people who can write and people who cannot. I sense, in that environment, if you can write, you would be super valuable. Because apart from just communication, there are a lot of areas where original writing would be required. Original writing = Original thinking.

A world divided into writers and non writers would be as bad as thinkers and not thinkers. This also reminds me of a quote I read, I don’t know who said it:

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.