“What still deserves to be thought about?
Mr. Director:
I don't know if this deserves to be published. That doubt is the problem I want to think about.
I'm a doctoral student. I spend my days reading Heidegger in German, Aristotle in Greek and Leibniz in Latin. Sometimes I dedicate whole weeks to a single word.
I recently asked an artificial intelligence to explain a distinction that had taken me months to understand. He did it in forty seconds. It was correct.
It was clear. It was, in a way, better than mine. And there I sat in front of the screen, wondering why I'm still.
I don't think the answer is to defend slowness by itself. The question is more uncomfortable: who decides, in a world where everything can be said instantly, what still deserves to be thought about?
That question requires something that is not technical. Demands to have ever been lost;
Having dedicated weeks to something that didn't work; that something matters enough to one that it hurts to make a mistake. The machines don't get lost.
I'm not worried that artificial intelligence writes better than me. I am worried that we confuse producing speech with thinking; that we deliver without realizing it the only task that was never technical:
Decide where to look.
This letter was written in dialogue with an artificial intelligence. The disturbing thing is that that is no longer the important thing.”
