Steven Budden Jr. gehört zu meinen Vorbildern aus der Welt der "Typewriter Revolution".
Er hat in diesem kurzen Text ein paar für mich wesentliche Punkte zum Thema "künstliche Intelligenz", digitaler Lebensstil und der Frage, wie lebendig wir sind und ob wir wirklich für den Zweck unserer Existenz leben, zusammengefasst.
Und hier geht's los:
When I started using a typewriter, I realized that Google had usurped parts of my mind. I was still capable of original thought, but I'd forgotten how to spell and how to linger in wonder. I'd forgotten how to navigate by landmarks, and how to enter the unknown with ease.
New studies show that ChatGPT and navigation pretty quickly shrink the hippocampus, the part of the brain tied to 'adventure'.
So it was frightening at first.
I had to surrender to the discomfort of misspellings and a memory that was suddenly less useful.
And I hadn't conquered every impulse. Every time a new technology came out, I, being curious, would dive in and waste a few more years.
But I kept the Screenless Writing running concurrently. And that kept a vital part of me alive. Most people I knew were scrolling their lives away. Five minutes of productivity was always accompanied by 30 minutes of mindless distraction. Or they'd always be 'learning' and never applying. A 'cerebral' reservoir of knowledge that had no practical value.
So, a computer can be an empowering research tool. It's not really an OPTIMAL research tool for a few reasons, but it can get the job done.
As a research tool, it suffers from the access to the world's information, carefully curated to fit the dominant narrative.
Seriously, books are a better research tool in the sense that you can scour through old books and find RADICAL ideas that would never make the internet. The books are out of print or unpopular, so they were not digitized. Therefore, those inputs are not in the google or the AI machine.
For instance, I study a lot of esoteric work, Gurdjieff, Steiner, etc. AI knows nothing about those, and Google has very little. I'll read an old Steiner lecture and be blown away again and again by the piercing insights and the precocious predictions. Something like Brave New World, but non-fiction.
Not to mention, the human mind has yet to think digitally. I use Trello for a lot of projects, because you can drag visual cards around the screen, which is not as good as dragging physical cards around a tabletop... but better than most interfaces. Many studies show the benefits of handwriting and reading on paper, in terms of retention, etc.
The computer renders the research environment a 2d abstraction. The 3d computers, as depicted in Minority Report the movie, would have a much better representation of the human mind, which operates like a spacial time map.
This is why writing a manuscript on paper, and rifling through pages, makes for better writing and thinking. Memory is activated and enhanced as well. The kinesthetic cues are used to connect one memory to another, and those are linked to sensations of an awareness of space and time.
Studies (from The Extended Mind book) also show that a larger screen makes for more creative problem solutions. What's larger than the largest screen? Screenless. The world. On a typewriter, the page is not 'the screen'. The awareness extends beyond the periphery and encapsulates the whole wide world of awareness. Even scents make it into the draft, when you become open.
So, though it is sometimes a fool's errand, I advocate for writing on a typewriter. Or Screenless Writing. I use little non-distraction artifacts sometimes, but they have a tiny screen, are digital and non spatial, and lack the tangible quality of ink on paper. Which, as I hope I've shown, is not mere nostalgia.
People think a typewriter is a quaint artifact from a distant past. It's only a few decades old. When I tell my daughter that Facebook didn't exist when I was a kid, she can hardly fathom it.
AI has a lot of the same drawbacks as Google, only amplified. The 'cell' phone now because a 'cell' with stronger bars on the window, and the appearance of a full life in the cell. People are sitting in a room, enjoying digital real estate while the flowers bloom and wilt outside the window; flowers that they never see except through a screen. Share the post: the flowers are all dying! Oh, because the seasons changed.
So, on a broader scope, humans have gradually lost contact with nature, the seasons, the cycles, and they've replaced it with a cold logic about 'facts' and primal addiction machines.
The broader solution, as always, is to come alive again. A living person interacts with AI differently than a non-living person... the ghost of a soul. Though, interact too long, and the liveliness begins to wane again... the flower begins to wilt.
I've followed the threads of inspiration and they've lead me to surprising places. An existential detective agency (akin to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and the agency from I Heart Huckabees)? A typewriter company? Thirty years ago, that one would have been completely commonplace... now it is radical.
People, being detached from nature and the world, have become wasteful. Blame corporations, yeah, and also individuals.
Buckminster Fuller said (in an 'old' book, Buckminster Fuller's Universe), that wastes or pollution were often a misplaced resource. For instance, one factory is dumping sulfur into the air... down the road, a company is mining sulfur from the earth. The two could join together for a zero waste solution.
Or placentas from birth. Placentas from organ donors fetch tens of thousands of dollars. In hospitals they're often discarded. We kept one frozen for years and then planted it under a lemon tree in Florida. The lemons were supposed to nourish the girl, and we ended up moving.
Anyway, the whole mindset and the construct are flawed, so we need to return to human. Slave labor mines rare earth minerals in the Congo, where dictators are held in power so the first world countries get the boon, and then they're shipped to slave-wage factories in China to throw together computers that were, ehem, 'designed in California.' As if that meant a damn thing. And these are obsolete in a few years, and the whole vicious cycle begins again!
I'm not cynical about it (anymore). I just think of Gandhi's quote: "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Everything else is semantic acrobatics; a distraction.
Whether a technology is evil or revolutionary is not exactly the right question.
The question is… how alive are you and are you living your purpose?
If so, the technologies fall into line with human consciousness, and what was one destructive becomes an ally to the flawed, sporadic, brilliant human creativity.
Anyway, thank you for listening. Welcome back to the real world. I'll see you on the other side.
Write on,
Steven Budden Jr.
Hier geht es zu Stevens web site:
https://www.classictypewriter.com
