We still use paper
humanpro.co
humanpro.co
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.
It feels like postcards are a dying thing because it seems harder and harder to find them when abroad! I try to pick them up in the airport now when I land that way I can immediately write them and mail them from the hotel. My last postcards sent from Bangkok took over 7 months to arrive, I assumed they had just gotten lost or destroyed. I think they must have come on a boat and/or maybe gotten stuck in the Suzez Canal.
I can fold the paper into origami.
I guess one could extrapolate a programming metaphor as the origami that notepad.exe enables.
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, even a cheap pilot Kakuno fountain pen will do, and you will understand why paper will never die.
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.
Yes, but AI gets them closer to those things faster.
> We need to fight the end goals at a social level rather than the temporary means
Again, yes, we need to fight the end goals, but we also have to stop the harm caused by the means. If there’s an arsonist going around burning people’s homes we do have to catch them but we also need to put out the fire on the houses burning right now (imperfect analogy, sure, as they all are).
While two out of those three risks do not require anything "ultraintelligent", for killing most jobs it's worth remembering that their track is an appropriation of intelligence, and the speedups happen where it's easiest to measure more than where the tracks correspond to economic value.
Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect for safety, and can still do a lot of wealth concentration even if it doesn't end all jobs.
They are on track to kill themselves with their decisions.
Humans have a bad track record predicting where a technology is going.
I do not know where AI heads in the next 5-25 years (I have my hypotheses, but they are likely off, too), but I see a useful tool that allows many people to experiment with and try things that they could not before and I do not see why should I subscribe to the doomer view.
As far as the moral character of the leaders: that's common, too. Many luminaries were, based on recollections, seen as pretty bad human beings and that didn't run off on their inventions. My 2c.
Today it's a useful tool. But in not too long--a few years, perhaps--this tool will be able to outsmart you. If you think this is definitely not going to happen, then okay--we see the progress in LLMs differently. I see machines which, in a matter of three years, went from being able to do basic proofs, to math Olympiad problems, to century-old Millennium problems. I see no reason why progress will slow down.
Any "tool" which is that much smarter than you is no tool, any more than you are the "tool" of your pet dog.
I understand wanting to feel better and be optimistic about the future. I'm unfortunately not, and that makes a lot of people feel bad. Again, I'm sorry! I don't want to be a downer. But it's important to me that people take these risks seriously and don't minimize them with expressions like "we still have paper" and "it's a useful tool."
Of course. And I am not claiming that my view is the view or even a particularly good view. It is just my personal worldview. But I think that with ups and downs, over generations and centuries, the world is on an uptrend. My parents were being driven, with their families, from their homes as kids; one of them lost an eye (as a kid) from a war; both lived through years of hunger. My grandparents saw real crap, two lived through a famine and saw many die from hunger.
But they all lived through those disruptions, worked and tried to build something better (I had to probe that information out of them; they did not even mention those things to us). I think the AI disruptions will not be nearly as painful and we will live through them just fine. Again, just a personal perspective.
> I see machines which, in a matter of three years, went from being able to do basic proofs, to math Olympiad problems, to century-old Millennium problems. I see no reason why progress will slow down.
I think what we see is LLMs picking the low hanging fruit. There is a lot of it, but I do not think we can extrapolate it. Some things will be particularly easy for LLMs to exceed humans on (like a steam engine being better in driving heavy machinery), some possible, many very hard. And humans will find new things to explore and build. We will see in 25 years (I am old and might not be alive then, but maybe I will see enough in 15).
As a side note: I do not know why you are being downvoted. I do not agree with your view, but I think it is intelligent and well written. I hope folks stop downvoting anything they disagree with and go back to downvoting on tone, not alignment.
I mean if you were a dinosaur you had a 100 million year uptrend and then it was suddenly over.
Things did not becomes better on accident, in general humans have wanted a better world for themselves. There is no scientific rule that says this must remain true. We have to strive for it. And if we hand over all this to a few rich people with intelligent machines there could be a huge upset here.
Yes. But my point is that we have a major crisis (and a part of the population thinking that the current way of life is over forever), every few generations. With your analogy, the dinosaurs had "the end is nigh" and "this time is different" doomerist beliefs a million times before finally being right.
Agree fully that it is good to strive for the improvement. But there are so many different views of what the improvement would look like, so we have good folks who, when spun up by their respective leaders, focus on their differences and start fighting. Which, IMO, is almost, almost, almost always a bad way to build something better. My 2c.
The world from the 90s till now has been one of rather open trade and exchange of energies like fuel. In that time the population has grown by at least 3 billion people. Billions of us depend on fuel being available every day or a countdown until there is no water or food starts. That fuel system is dependent on power being available to run things like pumps.
>doomerist beliefs a million times before finally being right.
Because you get zero chances of being wrong. Eventually humanities time will be up. I would rather that be millions of years from now rather than a few years because we collapsed under our own hubris.
I don't think this is accurate. Chainsaw is way more powerful than I am, yet it is definitely a tool. Computer is a tool too.
> I understand wanting to feel better and be optimistic about the future.
Historically, people who were pessimistic about the future, were very wrong. And this goes back centuries, if not millennia.
That's because the relationship between a tool and its wielder is primarily in intelligence.
Specifically, they tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, or so it’s said.
(Amara’s law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara )
Which is bad, and higher concentration makes the situation worse.
Western culture devolves into poor, corrupt, violent, petty criminality. Welcome to Mega Cairo.
Or imagining it’s going to the most utopian place possible, completely ignoring all the history which indicates the contrary.
That leads to pondering if we're actually seeing a similar shift today with AI.
I can think of a dozen jobs off the top of my head that aren’t even remotely at risk due to LLM-style AI. And if your reply is, it’s only a matter of time until humanoid robots replace all human jobs, you’re very divorced from reality. In hundreds of years, maybe. Not in your lifetime.
This tech will already have a massive effect on society, purely from being able to generate text and software code at will. What is the constant need to exaggerate this into a Sci-fi story?
And it would almost certainly happen before it got to the point of "they have enough robots to stop the masses". And probably we'd hit 3.5% rule[1] non-violent government regulation of AI before any of that.
The real risk of AI to me is that we're too heavily invested in it and when the bubble pops it could take a lot of institutions with it. And governments are not in a great position to bail economies out again.
It’s also a fallacy to assume that current progress implies future progress at the same rate. This is very basic technological history.
Again, a sci-fi fantasy for at least the next century.
Like that newfangled invention called the automobile. We could never produce millions of them to substantially replace all other means of transportation.
EDIT: Joking aside, I think that when humanoid robots get good enough (I'm predicting 5-10 years), there will an insatiable demand for them in every possible residential and commercial application. If we have as many cars and portable supercomputers (i.e., cellphones) as we have people, why is it hard to imagine producing as many robots as we have people?
And there’s also the economics of it all. They won’t replace people if people are cheaper.
But I don’t disagree that eventually it’ll happen. Just that this has little to do with LLMs.
One thing you are really missing is a small amount of job displacement is going to create a huge deflationary amount in wages. At the end of the day you don't need that many plumbers and electricians. There was a reason a lot of people moved to office and tech jobs starting in the 80s. Trades were a dead end at the time. And the same thing will happen again as labor shifts.
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.
The code is https://github.com/fschutt/azul/blob/fix/input-bugs-2026-09-... - the code is surprisingly readable, but the UI is very janky and I've only tested a bit on macOS so far. I'm still working on the UI framework, performance, etc.
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.
I’m not sure what you mean by it does not replicate well. You pick up a pen and start writing, ideally in cursive.
I tried his ways, and it worked great for me and been sticking with it for a decade.
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Apps like Excalidraw just does not cut it for me, as I have to switch my attention on which shape to use etc (it works ok for designining systems) but not for free thinking.
1. Paper has not been replaced by any tech because its form still has unique use-cases
2. AI is stuck in "chat" form and not all use-cases can be solved with chat.
Hence "AI will never replace paper" ..... well anything can happen really isn't it? 1 and 2 are quite independent statements.
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 American Students of Cooperaton (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 will still use them, but they won't rely upon them which is a different proposition entirely.
Cough, WordStar, cough...
To this day there are people who still use Wordstar, for instance.
(forgive me -- i probably should have used 'command line' instead of 'ms-dos'. it's just that ms-dos was my introduction to computers, and so felt like the 'beginning of all time' of systems to me.)
Actually, I use paper every day. I might even be going more "all in" on paper since I invested in fountain pens lately and have built a desk just for writing (with said fountain pens). But I'm probably an outlier.
(I do scan in my Field Notes notebooks to digital once I fill one up.)
Seems way too inconvenient compared to opening a notes app on a phone. I always have a phone with me, but there's no way I'd ever bring paper with me when leaving home.
>Or sketching an idea for a screen print or art design.
Fundamentally niche, but if ever wanted to draw anything, I'd get a tablet.
>Or making notes about what groceries to pick up the next time the wife and I head to the grocery store.
I use the cart of the grocery delivery app as a grocery list when going there in person. But if I didn't I'd just make a checklist in a notes app.
Maybe it would be different if I wasn't forced to use them to do things I hated for 10000+ hours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022152
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-goo...
Paper is one such.
I'm less sure keyboards will stay to the same degree. My thinking was always the bottleneck while programming, so even though I can talk faster than I type, I couldn't solve problems faster than I type. But I can now.
So I'm opting for speech-to-text when the office space allows it, and looking into steno (stenography) keyboards, or perhaps building a steno overlay on my custom split keyboard to go from 80-100WPM to 200+WPM.