Here is the opening of an email that I received today. Its from Google Gemini:

Hi Umbritzer,

Gemini Apps will soon be available for your children.

That means that your children willl be able to use Gemini to find inspiration, new things, and do things like:
- Create stories, songs, and poetry
- Ask questions
- Get homework help and more

What a strange world to be living in. This is not the world I was raised to live in.

When I was little I had a few non-school books that I read over and over and over till they tore apart at the spine. Even the new school books that were purchased every March looked decaying by May. There were no readymade solutions to anything.

Being the dumb little perfectionist I was, I reinvented the wheel with everything I did in those days. That was one way to kill the free stime, back in those days when I actually had free time. Computers, and that too without the Internet, were a fancy new thing. Parents used to scold me for sitting too long at it. Now, I turn hoarse telling them not to watch too much of their phones lest they rot their brains.

Books were the large language model you went through to learn things. They would tell you the same thing over and over. You had to make sense of them. You couldn’t ask a book a question. You could try to apply what it told you, a kind of hit and trial within your mind, till it worked. But these days you can simply ask the large language model in your pocket to explain everything to you.

Social Media is worse still. It shows you things that it thinks you must see. And people, including me, spend hours on it everyday.

Writing poetry was until a century or two ago considered an honourable pastime. But poetry has simply vanished from the prime space that it once occupied as an intellectual pursuit. Try to name any famous living poet. Writing a good essay or story may get some people to turn their heads in awe, but by no means does it earn the writer the same splendour that it did two decades ago. The ability to write to my mind would be the next to go. People will simply tell their AI equivalents to do this “boring” work for them. Once you do away with the ability to write normal, boring things you put in peril the ability to think through writing.

I look at my little son and wonder what his idea of intellectual accomplishment would be. I wonder if poetry is even taught at schools these days. I wonder if they will, in a few years, teach you to write an essay. Learning to write, in any language, is to my mind one of the chief ways of developing our ability to reason. This is how we begin to understand our own thoughts.

These are things only time will tell.