Do I still know how to write?
It has been years since I last really wrote a piece of text. It probably goes back to my school days, more than ten years ago now. Even at university, looking back, there was never much of an opportunity. The few sentences I wrote were mostly mathematical proofs, perhaps the occasional email. In high school, I remember hating and loving essays at the same time. The blank page, the expectation of writing something that would earn a good grade, the limited time.
I remember how the stress disappeared once I had written the first two or three sentences, always in a column. I remember the ritual of folding the page in half, getting ready for the teacher to give us the go-ahead. I remember the asymmetrical margins of the lined exam paper. I always wondered why its guidelines had been arranged that way. My analytical mind probably found the decision hard to justify. Yet there was something elegant about that paper. About its seemingly incongruous margins. About the columns that existed only in our minds.
Years have passed, and Italian lessons have left me with happy memories, but little knowledge. Perhaps we talked about antagonists, fairy tales, styles, more or less unhappy authors who fed us their conclusions, what humanity had decided should serve as a model. Perhaps the best proof of the value of Italian lessons when we are young is not that I know Don Abbondio's story, but that, after all these years without ever really writing, I can still put a few words one after another.
As I write, I realize that words no longer come to me as naturally as they once did. That is probably normal. It is so difficult to keep exercising your mind so it does not dry up. Beyond the fact that my mathematical and analytical path has already stripped much of the creativity and vocabulary from my writing, society really has changed since I wrote those essays by hand, with a fountain pen, on lined exam paper.
I am writing these thoughts on a tablet, with a pen that has no ink but leaves a mark on the screen that would be hard to distinguish from real ink. In fact, it looks exactly the same, but the capacitive pen redirects the ink particles already in the page. They can be made invisible or visible as many times as I like, at an imperceptible speed, so that I can write this text by hand, with the feel of paper and pen, on an unlimited number of pages, without wasting a single drop of real ink.
Then there is AI. These days, writing a text, even a message of just a few words, feels so difficult. Even reading now seems like a waste of energy and time. And I do not mean a book. I mean the answer, more than two lines long, that AI has put in front of me in response to the question I usually ask, perhaps less than two lines long.
AI, though, has written plenty of words. Hundreds, thousands, and for some of the things I ask it, even millions. To answer that one question of mine, one of the many I ask every day, AI wrote more in that single session than I have written, or will ever write, in my entire life.
I wonder whether those words that were once precious, the words someone once wrote on a sheet of paper and that could become study material for schoolchildren like me, are worth the same today.
In economics, scarcity means value. Today, AI can produce more words in a day than all of humanity has produced throughout history. And not random words. Novels, proofs, instructions, philosophical descriptions, in any language. So, if scarcity has decreased but the content seems equivalent to the writing that came before, is it fair to say that text has lost its value today?
I do not read it, I do not write it; AI reads the text it has written itself, based on one or two words spat out by my keyboard or dictated. And yet, perhaps it is unfair to say that text no longer has value simply because scarcity is no longer a problem.
Handwritten words are the most concrete expression of human consciousness and ingenuity. Perhaps, in the past, putting your thoughts on paper was simply expensive: paper, ink, time, energy. Although, in my opinion, writing today is even more costly because, quite simply, there is no need for it.
AI writes for us, communicates for us, and sometimes, more and more often, thinks for us.
I am glad I managed to write my thoughts in this text today. A challenge to myself. Are you still able, Enrico, to bring your thoughts together into coherent sentences?