Comment by visarga
1 day ago
Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.
How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.
AI hits different. Books didn’t kill the thinking, AI does. If AI does the writing you can’t find your voice
Agreed. Similarly, people saying their authorship and thought are realized in output selection and post-generation editing are limiting themselves to a much smaller range of expression.
No amount of polish changes a car's frame.
Do books make us less capable of rote memorization?
Or do we just not take the effort to do the massive amounts of rote memorization that used to be necessary, now that we have books?