We Still Use Paper

"We still use horses" is also true, but no one would say that America has a thriving horse economy. Paper isn't any different.

I used to be part of several student housing cooperative systems. They were artfully designed and inspired by B.F. Skinner's utopian novel Walden Two. They utilized labor-sharing systems that worked for decades. By the time of the late 2000s, they were all failing along the same faultlines and required intervention from a national organization, the North America Students for Cooperative Organization (NASCO), to keep them financially and systemically afloat, which is not the same as functional.

When these organizations were still functional, they kept meticulous paper archives. Meeting minutes, policy updates, instructional information, etc. When they stopped being functional, these archives just gathered dust in the corner of the local organization's office, next to the computers.

You see, the entire process of having in-person meetings, capturing good shorthand notes, then typing up formal minutes from those notes, then creating copies for distribution and archives take significant time. And there's accountability on the receiving end. So documents must meet a certain bar of decorum and effort.

When the desktop computers showed up, those norms began to slip. It's not a hard sell. It's much easier to just have a place where you can type up, edit, and print documents, all in one place, without wasting paper. But wait! It's even more environmentally friendly to not print the files. People can just access them on the computer, if they want to (hint: they actually don't). But meeting notes were still at least done by hand then turned into digital documents.

Then the laptops showed up, and instead of people taking paper notes to then transform into digital documents, they just became shorthand txt and doc files that never got turned into actual formatted documents. And having a laptop capable of being on the Internet means that the person in charge of minutes is never fully on task. Who wouldn't be?

And so by the late 2000s and early 2010s, the entire paper-based ecology began to disappear entirely. And so went the legibility and effort along with it. Sure, major things continued to be printed, but nothing else was.

So yes, they still use paper, but they don't rely upon it. That's the difference. AI is doing the same thing to human brains. Yes, people still use them, but they won't rely upon them which is a different proposition entirely.

Most feel-good pieces on AI make the same mistake, which is looking at where the ball is and not where it's going. If progress were to halt today, this article would be relevant and I'd upvote it.

But since the richest and least trustworthy people on earth are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.

The tech industry will continue to promise steak and deliver hot dogs.

If you want to experience the height of paper as a technology, pick up some Tomoe River paper (https://bungu.store/products/tomoe-river-notebook-sakae-tech...) or a Hobonichi Techo and some nice Japanese gel pens, or fountain pens and you will understand why paper will never die.

Usually these posts are about the benefits of using paper for your memory, focus, etc.

But I think a blank page is even more valuable for its explicit emptiness. You are somewhat required to be original when using paper. Or at least use your imagination than when you’re using a computer and can easily browse the internet for inspiration, use a software program to evaluate your writing or make suggestions, and so on.

It feels to me like culture generally has been unoriginal and echoing itself for a few decades now, and I do wonder how much of that is related to our choice of tools.

If like to point out that word processors existed well before DOS, and that DOS itself didn’t exist until many years into the personal computer revolution.

To this day there are people who still use Wordstar, for instance.

> This article was written with WriteMapper, a mind-mapping desktop app for thinking and writing available on macOS and Windows.

So, one of the things many people use paper for has been replaced.

Of course paper will never be replaced, I can't fold my computer into an airplane for instance. But it is still attacked from all sides. This article ironically is an example of replacing paper for note taking applications, it is also an example of not using paper for publishing, though that part is old hat now, to the point we are not even realizing it. Official documents turn towards digital signatures, e-readers are getting popular even to physical book fans, paper money use is declining, artists use tablets... It looks like paper as a support for writing is soon going to be like horses today, we still use horses, but only for very niche applications, and as sports/hobby.

I don't expect paper to be phased out as a material though, for packing, building, etc... It is cheap, environmentally friendly, and good for many applications.

Stopped using paper the day I graduated uni. Digital tools are superior in all aspects for my way of thinking.

The very need for a dedicated defense of “we still use paper” is itself a sign that paper is in its twilight.

I haven't used paper for anything since I graduated college 10 years ago. Excluding education where I only used paper because I was forced to, closer to 20 years. I would much rather open a text editor or a spreadsheet on PC.

I was recently hired at a datacenter buildsite. The pen is the most important tool here.

I did use to review the AI slop code on paper, it was extremely effective in quality, but extremely slow as a feedback loop: https://imgur.com/a/ZRg5x7t

There is some science on this, how reading on paper activates different brain waves than a screen and how the physical layout of pages activates spatial memory recall: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/Papercode-printing-code-on-... and https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-TEaM0pn3IZjrvQMHUDDCtB...

I am currently working on combining all of that into a code review tool to more effectively review slo.. AI pull requests. I am not sure if people here would be interested, but basically the idea is to not use the keyboard anymore to type your annotations, but only use a tablet / pen and voice (with transcription), so that code review is much more ergonomic. So you can "paint" on your code, make annotations, have a "physical" layout of your code, architecture overlays, etc. and then agents re-edit the code until it is what you want.

We still have horses. I wouldn't recommend a career as a farrier.

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I don't understand the point of this blog post. Who said paper will be replaced by AI?