A few weeks ago Nancy and I had a brief exchange that reminded me to something I've been thinking about for years. Anyone reading this has seen an enormous amount of change in their lives. Some change has been for the better, some is arguably neutral and. . well.. some has been negative. I started a list and asked a few others for their comments. Rather than bore and bias you with my own list, I'll just note a few items and start with the comments of others.
I contacted eight people under the age of forty hoping to exclude those of us who had to walk miles through ten foot snow drifts. All eight mentioned parts of the Internet (something at last as broad as the term AI) as problematic.. six singled out "social media" in one form or another
wastes time
algorithmically addictive that creates a bias
terrible for self-image and filled with hate
bots and destabilizing countries
Most said social media was useful for some things, but we'd be better off without it. "AI" - specifically LLMs and generative tools like ChatGPT were noted by three with worries about ownership, bias and techbro mentality. Two singled out smartphones as time wasters (one of them has gone back to a flip phone). One summed it up riffing on Cory D. noting "we are living in the enshittocene..."
Other social areas were mentioned: the loss of civility, women's rights, increase in hate against others, and the move to autocracy, but I'll move on.
I've written quite a bit about the importance of latency to my teenage math and physics education. The fact that I couldn't get immediate answers - often for a few weeks - forced me to think. Any tendency I have to think deeply about something probably came out of this period. If I had wikipedia and YouTube videos I probably would have looked, but not learned at any depth. (Perhaps others do) It sharpened my sense of wonder. High latency asynchronous communication had and has its place in my life. When I read a scientific paper and react to it. There have been times when months go by as I puzzle things out. I can still do this, of course, but something can be lost with quick communication. It's something I am still learning to manage.
We seem to have become more interrupt driven. My first non-academic job was with the Bell Telephone Laboratories - I use that distinction as it changed radically about a decade after I joined. My lab director had us pick a four hour period, morning or afternoon, where we had near total control over our time. We could shut the phone off and had flags outside our private offices indicating we were in "cave mode", could entertain an interruption from someone working with us, or the office was open. It wasn't standard Bell Labs practice and I found myself coming in around five am to have time without interruption after moving to a different lab without the policy. It's important as even a short interruption like a short phone call can cause you lose anywhere from five to fifteen minutes trying to context switch and regain a train of thought. Some may think we multitask, but when it comes to conscious thought studies almost universally show we're bad at it.
And then there's handwriting. Many schools now focus on keyboarding. Cursive writing has largely disappeared. It turns out that may be a loss. A number of studies show better retention and linkages with other ideas when we mechanically print or use cursive. The brain is plastic throughout life, but under the age of about 20 it's much more plastic with new neural connections being made along with growth in some parts of the brain. Recent studies like this one show handwriting is much better neurologically than typing on a keyboard. There's also emerging evidence that people who use handwriting for notes and letters protect themselves from dementia. The effect appears to be as strong as people who are multilingual or play musical instruments. The evidence is strong enough that Sweden is abandoning keyboard use for non-programming classes and moving back to teaching cursive.
My handwriting is terrible, but that doesn't seem to be important.. it's that use of a fine motor skill while thinking.1 I'm guessing the same goes for drawing and sketching things you are thinking about for non-artistic reasons. I've collected a few used books and notebooks over the years from a variety of scientists. It's stunning to see how many doodles and margin notes fill the pages. And for me there's something special about the right chalk on a high quality slate or a fine pencil on good paper. The "feel" seems to help me think, but take that as an anecdote.
I'll stop here - these are a few examples where I can turn from what I see as a loss and find a path that works better for me. I add that one person's loss might be another's gain. In any event I'd be interested in learning what you see as losses over your life as well as steps you may have taken.
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1 I have regular handwritten correspondences with two people. In both cases it's mixed mode. One is an artist, the other a physicist and drawings are interspersed with the words. There's a wonderful connection one feels with these physical bits of communication.