There is a piece of advertisement that has been appearing in my feed lately, always beginning with the same line: “I haven’t written a single word in four months.”
Apparently, it is meant to impress.
The product, powered by artificial intelligence, listens to what you say and turns it into polished writing. You don’t need to draft, or delete paragraphs that never quite matched the thought in your head. Just speak, and the application does the rest. No fingers required.
I noticed something else happening in me each time it appeared. My reaction was physical. My heartbeat would quicken, my breathing shifted slightly, and a kind of discomfort would rise before I had time to explain it to myself.
The advertisement wasn’t asking me to stop writing, but somehow, that is what I heard.
Living Ahead of Myself
I have a habit of sometimes taking ideas much further than they probably deserve. Even as a kid, I did this without thinking. If I liked a girl, I didn’t stay with the question of whether she liked me back. My mind immediately began constructing an entire future that neither of us had agreed to. What if I wanted to live in the city and she preferred the country? What if she wanted children but I didn’t? What if something as small as the way we held hands eventually revealed that we weren’t compatible after all?
One thought led to another, and then another, until the relationship had already ended somewhere inside my imagination–before it ever had a chance to begin. The future always seemed to arrive too early in my head.
Watching the advertisement, I recognized that same habit. One implication led to another, and before long I was no longer thinking about the commercial itself. I was already living inside everything it might eventually set in motion.
That realization reminded me of another contradiction I’ve carried around for years. For someone who spends so much time imagining the future, I have remarkably little interest in being the first to live in it.
A Reluctant Early Arrival
Years ago, when I worked as a technical support analyst, I discovered there was already a name for people like me.
In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore divides technology users into groups based on how quickly they adopt new tech. At one end are the innovators and early adopters, eager to experiment with whatever comes next. At the other are the laggards, people who hold on to what already works until there is little reason left not to change.
That was me. The last one to throw out Grandma’s bulky rotary phone.
While so many people rushed out to buy the latest smartwatch, I looked at my phone and wondered what problem I was supposed to be solving. It already told time. It rang when someone called. It sent text messages. It let me browse the web on a screen much larger than the watch itself. I never felt the urgency the early adopters seemed to experience.
That’s when another contradiction became impossible to ignore. In my imagination, I rush toward the future before it exists. In real life, the future has a habit of arriving long before I am ready to let go of what is still working for me.
Living with Contradictions
The more I thought about it, the less this felt like a contradiction unique to me. Perhaps it is simply part of the human condition.
We long for stability while chasing change. We admire tradition while celebrating innovation. We praise people for standing by their principles, then criticize them for refusing to adjust to the times. We find comfort in what is familiar, yet quickly grow restless when nothing changes.
There are those in every generation who seem convinced that a new invention will permanently diminish something essential about being human.
When photo cameras first appeared, many feared they would destroy personal privacy. Electronic calculators were criticized for weakening students’ ability to do mental arithmetic. ATMs were expected to eliminate virtually all bank teller jobs.
Each invention arrived carrying predictions about what it would take away from us. Some fears proved exaggerated. Others contained a measure of truth. Either way, the inventions remained, and the debates that once surrounded them gradually faded into history.
What usually survives is neither the catastrophe predicted nor the promised utopia that people imagined. The automobile never ended walking. The personal computer promised a paperless society that never materialized. And there are more bank tellers today than when ATMs were first introduced. We adopted the inventions that genuinely solved problems, while many of the grand predictions surrounding them quietly disappeared.
The Promise Behind the Technology
The more I thought about the advertisement, the less I found myself thinking about artificial intelligence as a technology. What stayed with me instead was the appeal of what it removes.
Not just writing itself, but the hesitation before writing. The uncertainty of whether a thought deserves attention. The slow work of turning something half-formed into something coherent, only to delete it and begin again. The software happens to write, but what it offers first may be relief.
It can organize thousands of scattered ideas. It can remember birthdays we would otherwise forget. It can draft the message we have been avoiding. It can finish sentences before we have decided how they should end. It can carry my thoughts farther than I have to.
That realization made me uncomfortable for a different reason. The very habits that make writing difficult for me, second-guessing myself, exploring possibilities, following one thought into another, are also the habits that make this promise so attractive.
At some point, I began wondering how many thoughts I would eventually stop having simply because I no longer needed to have them myself? At what point does asking the machine become easier than wrestling with the thought on my own?
Those two possibilities seem to exist inside the same invention.