Of the Importance of Writing for the
Organic Brain
If there were 10 seconds left on an explosive device, and the only way to disable it was by completing a long-division problem, the world would likely lose the joy of my brilliant humor and charming personality forever. Perhaps ironic, given that I’m an engineer, but it’s also perfectly logical. I’ve spent more time relying on machines to do my calculations than the average person—a facility that comes with its tradeoffs. Calculators are abundant, with little worry of suddenly being deprived of one, so I’ve allowed the numeracy grey matter to atrophy (even though I literally wear a calculator watch—more for the style points than the utility). The point is, I reckon that reliance on a tool will, in most cases, erode your natural ability to do ‘by hand’ the thing the tool is doing. So then, what do I make of the use of LLMS, the ability to generate text, analyze data, and, most importantly, walk the communication tightrope that is telling my mother I will be missing a family dinner due to some pressing founder responsibility or another? Well, as meta as it is, this is my preventative response to a problem I believe will best the vast majority of us. Writing. Writing keeps profoundly important neural pathways alive, because writing isn’t just about ‘generating’ text—it’s a tool reinforcing the brain’s ability to excavate the subconscious, analyze data, and manifest findings into concrete reality. That’s all a fair bit esoteric, but the ability to do all of those things—the human component of it all—is already what creates distinction among us, and that distinction, in my estimation, is set to widen into a profound intellectual gap as we move forward as a society. As such, I’ve committed myself this year to, on a continuous basis, making a practice of excavating my thoughts (and, almost equally importantly, sharing them with the digital sphere)—not for the benefit of the algorithm, but for the benefit of my own faculties and also a latent desire to create discourse and community where I can.
Of the Importance of Writing for the
Synthetic Brain
As much as writing benefits the organic brain, it also plays a vital role in shaping how we interact with synthetic systems. A brief, but important, sidebar: The grand irony, or perhaps the great paradox of the world that I see now, is that we have pushed humanity into assimilation, replication, and rote recital of process in most areas—and now, with eclipsing velocity, we push machines towards a simulacrum of humanness. The place where those two things meet in the middle is a point far sooner than the singularity, and the gap closes all the more quickly because it is pushed from both sides. “They’re coming for our jobs!” we screamed at the computers, but if, at present, those very same computers could scream, they’d very likely project the same phrase back at us. That is not a moral statement but an observation—I work and profit from AI all the same. But the focus of this particular entry is writing. At present, I have several AI systems which serve as knowledge bases of my thoughts, methods, beliefs, directives, goals, and other cognitive fodder. I find that my personal (generative) AI is of most utility to me when it has a basis for the way I do things, reason, and export. As such, I encourage people to truly think about how to set themselves up for success in the future—how to have enough data (which they own* but that conversation will be for another time) to feed a system (ideally on-premise) in such a way that it becomes of optimal utility to you. One of the best sources of this specific type of data is your own long-form writing. Not written for the algorithm (because surprise, if you spend your time writing things that sound like the best average of acceptable thought, nothing can be personalized to you—and also surprise, you’ve atrophied your own ability to find your true voice, and also surprise, you’ve set yourself up for replacement), but written for yourself with accessibility and extensibility in mind. I truly believe that, beginning at present, those who have managed to make delivering the conversations they’ve had, the concepts they’ve thought, and any other unstructured ‘data’ tangible will hold a competitive (for whatever that’s worth) edge in the future.
Brandon
Not sent from AI. My buddy, Cyril, and I demonstrating Casio supremacy. Trade-off? Worth it.