Writer

“Would you like to write this with AI?”

I am asked this question, by LinkedIn, WordPress, and several other writing tools and sites where I publish my writing. As I skip the AI button inside my head is an existential scream:

NO! I’M TRYING TO BE A WRITER DAMMIT!

I call myself a writer and I do write a fair amount, no great American novel (yet), but ruminations on wisdom I have stumbled upon and share. I have self-published one book Traveling the Consulting Road, and am getting close on a second Change Leader? Who Me?  Still, as my defensive self-talk might indicate, I’m a little insecure in the writer title, but I definitely don’t want computer code doing it for me.

“Here honey, Let me tie your shoes.”

“I CAN DO IT MYSELF!”

I have always been a storyteller. It is a talent (or affliction) I inherited from my father who could spin a yarn to the delight (or annoyance) of many. I’ve discovered that not everyone has patience with my natural communication mode.

“STOP! We don’t have time for one of your stories,” said Kerry, the twenty-five year old consultant who viewed it as her job to keep the old process guy moving. (I was not even fifty then. I hate to think what Kerry would say now.)

Let’s face it, I like words, spoken or written. I think words are what makes us human. I’ve been thinking about human history embodied in the progression: Language—Story—Writing, and the various technologies that have changed communications.

Language

There is no contemporaneous report of how humans learned to talk. There are various theories about the development of language:

• The continuation of the gestures we see in animals today. Our ancient black lab is very good at communicating when she wants to eat or go out.
• A unique event in our evolution, specific DNA gene that spontaneously mutated.
• Some divine creation event.
• Some social event like collective labor that produced a rhythmic song – “(Hoh! Ah!) (Well don’t you know).That’s the sound of the men, Working on the chain, ga-ang (Hoh! Ah!)”

We may soon have more idea. The FOXP2 gene has been identified as controlling the development of speech in children. Perhaps by analyzing DNA from the oldest hominid remains we may find the point where FOXP2 develops. Or perhaps we will be left with Buonarotti’s Sistene finger touching moment.

When did language show up? One or three hundred thousand years ago? Dunno

Whenever we came up with the first words, it is apparent that they evolved into stories.

Story

In caves in Lascaux and Chauvet  in the south of France, there are some pretty spectacular pre-PowerPoint hunting story illustrations that date to between 17,000-30,000 BCE. Many early stories are an attempt to explain things, like why we all use different words. In Genesis II in the Bible is an old story that exists in many cultures, The Tower of Babel.

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. . . .And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. . . . And the LORD said, Behold. . . . now nothing will be restrained from them.  . . . let us . . . confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

And that is why, in comedian Steve Martin’s words, “cat is chat, dog is chien, hat is chapeau! Those French! They have a different word for everything!”

Different languages created a challenge for trade, and there grew up a lingua franca, a traders tongue, a combination of gestures and signs, which you can still see in markets around the world.

There are creation and great flood stories in many cultures; there are explanations for the sun and stars, and animal tales with morals like Aesop’s “Hare and Tortoise.” Slow, but steady wins.

Once, we lived in oral cultures where elders and shaman storytellers kept history and educated the young. The transition to writing was uneven. In Europe Germanic tribes developed an alphabet, but the Celtic tribes (Gauls, Belgae, and Helvetii) aggressively shunned writing

Hearing a story uses different neural pathways in our brains than reading the same stories. This is partly due to using different senses. Hearing develops in the womb, whereas vision is refined later. Early childhood research shows that children who are read to, read earlier and more throughout their lives. Story is powerful and fun.

Writing

People who study the evolution of writing talk about “writing systems, which usually start with a glyph or pictogram which represents a product and/or a count, on clay tablet cuneiform in Sumer – Hieroglyphs in Egypt- Chinese characters – Mayan ideograms and phonetic glyphs in Mesoamerica.

These early pictogram systems would have been most useful to traders and tax collectors. So it should be no surprise that the earliest alphabets were developed by the Phoenicians purple-sailed galley traders from Tyre and the Sumerian empire. These alphabets represented the sounds of speech -The Phoenician and Aramaic right to left represented consonants. The Greek left to right, added vowel sounds and cursive writing where one letter flows to another. The Latin alphabet built on the Greek.

Writing began as a specialized skill, practiced by the very educated, or professional scribes. In  1452, moveable type and the Gutenberg press, destroyed the scribe trade, democratized writing, and ultimately led to Palmer method cursive penmanship instruction, wherein I never earned above a ‘C’ in school. For a while in millennials education, the ubiquity of typing, stopped schools teaching cursive writing. Some are reinstating it now.

Research using electrode-net caps and MRIs has found that handwriting uses different neural pathways than listening to a story, and also different from reading. The synapses are strongest with cursive writing, stronger than printing and much stronger than typing. A stronger signal leads to a deeper pathway, and better memory. I discovered that when I took notes by hand, I could sit down and type a lecture or an interview almost verbatim. When I tried to do that by typing, I couldn’t remember more than about forty percent.

Handwriting, as bad as my penmanship has become, helps me. I often begin writing by handwriting an outline, and first sentences of each section. During times of transition, a handwritten journal helps me move forward. Whenever I am stuck, too many things to do and unable to prioritize, I always find handwriting it down helps me see order and the path.

AI

Now, AI wants to write for me, and I ain’t having any of it..

As I understand it, generative artificial intelligence works like our autopilot brain works, what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 in Thinking Fast and Slow. System 1 scans all available data looking for patterns of behavior and then frequency gambles (In the past, Alan has turned right here 80% of the time, turn right). We use System 1 most of the time and that’s efficient.

AI has a much larger dataset to work with, because it’s trained on everyone else’s writing and so probably puts out copy that is clear and grammatically correct. I admit I may not always do that, but my writing is me, not a homogenous amalgam of everyone, assembled by computer code.

My mother the mathematician, used to decry my use of calculators. “Don’t use those things, Alan. They rot your brain.” She could do compound interest in her head and I catch myself pulling out my phone to divide by ten.

I’m left wondering about the progress (or rot) of the human brain. What did we lose in transition from oral to written culture? What did we lose from scribes to printing? (Have you seen the Book of Kells?) What are we losing as we type rather than handwrite? And what might we lose to AI generated text?

Maybe we’ll just start over.

 “Word, Dude! Reminds me of a story. Say, is anyone writing this down?”