I started my first blog at 7. Tumblr was pretty big at the time, and I randomly found myself writing about the football transfer market a few times a week. For some reason, people liked what I had to say. Till date, I can't understand why, and I wonder if they would've been interested had they known my age at the time. [1] I didn't particularly enjoy writing, nor did I have any intention of becoming a sports analyst. Truthfully, I don't think I knew what I was even doing. I simply enjoyed something, found myself writing, and enjoyed what I was writing about.
Each day, we tend to write more words than we speak. Consider emails, texts, tweets, comments, to-do lists, [meeting and/or class] notes, etc. In most cases, we don't enjoy writing. Plainly put, writing (or typing rather) can feel tiresome and possibly annoying – emails probably top the list. Currently, I and many others use ChatGPT or Claude to write responses to emails. In the near future, tools like Friday Mail and Superhuman will respond to emails for us automatically. This isn't a bad thing by any means. Emails can be tiresome, and I'm a huge advocate of finding tools to make one's day-to-day far more efficient. Also, the advent of smarter email tools probably has relatively insignificant consequences long-term. [2]
Assuming these succeed – and they likely will: emails are a burden – the obvious next step is more tools to make writing even ‘easier’. Consider a text-messaging tool which has been trained on your personality, writing style and relational context. Or a tool that generates a shopping list based on a picture of your fridge. [3] Not to mention, AI agents that could generate industry-standard reports based on auto-replied emails and nifty web scraping.
On the surface, these few examples would likely be helpful and save time. But, I worry we'll simply find ourselves writing less and less for ourselves and each other.
The reason we may write less is not because of these new tools. Instead, these tools have emerged from a perception of daily writing as burdensome or laborious. I think we'll write less in general, and there's enough to indicate we'll use brain-computer interfaces in many daily tasks over the next two decades. Of course, the rate at which this occurs depends on the technology itself. If I had to guess based on the last few years, I expect it would begin at a linear pace and then accelerate exponentially as the infrastructure to build such tools becomes more accessible.
Should this occur, I don’t believe we will completely forego writing over time nor will we risk significant evolutionary regression or cognitive atrophy. Instead, we will likely ‘write’ with more advanced means. At its most basic level, writing is an extremely cognitive process, and we’ll still require degrees of cognition in the future – whether for prompt engineering with chatbots or text conversion with neural implants.
My concern essentially involves the dichotomy between generated text and written text; we use both on a daily basis. The former implies I/O processes: email responses, meeting notes, to-do lists, etc. These are systematic processes which prioritise precision, accuracy and efficiency. It’s easy to see why these are the first wave of productivity tools.
Written text, on the other hand, requires a level of cognition. We use these often when required to think about what we’re writing: tweets, DMs, journaling. Written text requires creativity, personality, and an ineffable sense of ‘humanness’. It’s also easy to see why these aren’t as easy to automate compared to the others.
There is something extremely agentic and intentional about consciously written text. We appreciate consciously written text because we possess consciousness, and therefore can fathom the inner workings required to produce such text. To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic because of Harper Lee’s experiences in the racially segregated South. Things Fall Apart would not have been the same without Chinua Achebe’s experiences with cultural conflict in colonial Nigeria. Frankly, it’s the same with most art forms: there are entire disciplines dedicated to interpreting the consciousness displayed in film, text, visual art, etc.
Beyond art forms and communicative mediums, writing has played an integral role in our anthropological evolution: the documentation of religious texts, important historical events, scientific discoveries, and so on.
On a more granular – and possibly more relatable – level, receiving a carefully crafted love letter from a significant other not only produces a series of brain chemicals, but a deep acknowledgement of the emotion expressed through another’s consciousness. I can bet you would cherish a thoughtful morning text far more than a Shakespearean-inspired sonnet generated by ChatGPT.
As it stands, I believe we neither enjoy nor appreciate a) the process of writing and b) written text itself enough. If enough of us cease to write, we would eventually evolve past the need for it, possibly leading to a relaxation of selective pressure on humans to fulfil the need for written communication.
There is a strong relationship between consciousness, agency, ownership and freedom. [4] We’re simply in the earliest stages of astronomical technological advancements, and while I’m eager, I think it’s important we retain those four core human elements. I simply believe writing is a fairly unadorned way to do so.
This writing needn’t be overly serious or formal, but I believe writing effortlessly is one way to write more. I’ve often likened Twitter (and I suppose now Bluesky) to J.S. Mill’s marketplace of ideas, and I suppose that’s one way to maintain agentic writing. In my experience, I write more – and hopefully better – about things which feel natural.[5] The more we enjoy it, the more we’ll do it. It’s pretty important we begin enjoying it in order to preserve its quality.
I implore you to write something slightly different each week. For instance, yesterday I wrote a script of The Office set in a digital marketing company in Abuja, Nigeria. [6] Next week, I may possibly write my first thread on Twitter. Who knows? Either way, the freedom to consciously express my own thoughts and exercise my agency is not one I take for granted, and not one any of us should. [7]
I believe we’ll have pretty powerful avatars in the near future capable of interacting with one another. I welcome this future, but maintaining ownership of our expression becomes even more crucial as technology advances. Writing regularly – whether it's fiction, social media, or personal reflections – helps us retain our distinctly human ability to demonstrate our consciousness with words. And in every moment of writing, we affirm a fundamental truth: to write is to choose.
[1] Interestingly, that bizarre fact may have made it all the more intriguing.
[2] Of course, not including legitimate concerns surrounding data protection & privacy.
[3] I came across this video by Daniel Bourke where he trained Google's Gemini on the objects in his home.
[4] I tried to employ anadiplosis here, but it sounded more cringe with each new variation.
[5] Twitter is an interesting one: the monetisation of content means the expression of ideas and opinions is at risk of further dilution.
[6] If anyone knows how I can get in contact with Michael Schur and Funke Akindele, let’s make this happen.
[7] Philip Pettit published a great paper on social freedom.
