The tantalizing message of working "at the speed of thought" is something I've heard from conflicting places. My typography professor in college was first, making the case for starting designs with a simple pencil-and-paper tech stack. Because the pencil is so simple it allows you to place your plans and thoughts into the physical realm at almost the speed that you have those plans and thoughts. Later I heard this same phrase used by another designer, this time to support his argument that professionals must learn the keyboard shortcuts to a program so that you can create in an unencumbered way.
In both of these instances, designers were arguing that technology (whether ancient or modern) allows us to produce what we want as close to mental conception as possible. It's a beautiful, divine idea, to think that our mere thoughts could be brought into life—what greater show of power and creativity is there than to think something into being?
Generative AI makes similar promises: Now you can do anything you want, no need to become a coder and a writer and a marketer. Just speak what you will and this all-knowing digital servant shall make it so.
Now that LLMs are past the party-trick phase and can actually be helpful—and are simultaneously and equally dangerous—I'm starting to question this beloved phrase, "at the speed of thought." What was once a mantra that helped me make decisions about processes and tools is now a call for thinking about my thinking.
The Assumption
It's baked into the phrase, but to put it more explicitly, the assumption is that our thoughts are valuable and we should be racing to capture them as fast as possible. There may be some truth to this, because much of the time, I do wish I could capture my thoughts. Of course there are many thoughts that are not worth capturing, but it can be hard to know the worth of a thought until after it has been put down on paper or in some other physical manifestation. I have also noticed that the thought loses quality as it gets expressed or captured.
For example, I've had some amazing thoughts about themes in this newsletter. I'll read something in a book and a chain reaction gets set off in my mind as I've stumbled upon some majestic connection between everything I've ever known. It's thrilling and fun. Then I sit down to write it and it's a complete mess, hardly a transition in sight, weak arguments, and silly examples. It doesn't matter if I did everything right: jotting down notes, quick sketches, and high-level outlines immediately upon having the thought. The thought has moved from the environment of my mind (my memories, experiences, knowledge, biases, etc.) and into the physical world. It's a translation process, and there is always something lost or changed in any kind of translation.
So even given the perfect conditions where there is no memory loss involved, "working at the speed of thought" can only ever be an aspiration.
The Consequences
Because it is so aspirational, you can bet that we'll continue to attempt to develop some method of production at the speed of thought, although you can argue we're already pretty close. The sheer volume of thoughts released into the world via social media alone is staggering. However, there may be more at stake than being further inundated by the amount of "stuff" to sort through on the Internet. To explore this, it's time to formally introduce you to Marshall McLuhan, the name that inevitably comes up in every book about technology, mass media, philosophy of tech, and other such CYBORG_ genres that I've dug through so far.
McLuhan is a philosopher who has a profound grasp of the impact that technology has had on us. He died in 1980, which makes many of his insights all the more intriguing since he mostly missed the computer age.
In his essay, At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theater in which There Are No Spectators, But Only Actors, McLuhan explores how technology may be propelling us beyond speech, because of how instantaneously information can be accessed and understood. He wasn't talking about the Internet in this piece—he was largely referring to TV!
He sets the stage by explaining how humans have acted differently in the various states of information-technological innovation, i.e. before reading/writing calling them "preliterate/simultaneous man"; "Gutenberg man" meaning after the printing press; and the "electronic man" which he argues began in 1957 after Sputnik was launched into space.
Ecological thinking and planning have always been native to preliterate man, since he lived not visually but acoustically. Instead of having external goals and objectives, he sought to maintain an equilibrium among the components of his environment in order to ensure survival. Paradoxically, electronic man shares much of the outlook of preliterate man, because he lives in a world of simultaneous information, which is to say, a world of resonance in which all data influence other data. Electronic and simultaneous man has recovered the primordial attitudes of the preliterate world and has discovered that to have a specialized goal or program merely invites conflict with all other specialized enterprises.
It's not that we're now overloaded with information like never before. McLuhan makes the case that we have a lot in common with ancient humans who were fully immersed in the natural world, which is brimming with information—specifically sensory information like sounds, smells, and sights, but also danger and all of the clues surrounding those dangers. To me, this highlights the real issue is in the incentives and design behind our technology, in particular the attention economy. If, as McLuhan asserts, humanity used to operate in an environment of constant simultaneous information, then we already know what to do and we're probably even evolutionarily set up for success. The issue is that we've created systems that trap us in patterns of information consumption with little ability or leftover energy to process, rest, and move forward.
The system is designed to not just encourage equilibrium (as in, engagement with the platform) but to make it almost impossible to choose not to accept the equilibrium. It's as if we placed ourselves back in the environment of over-stimulation but we also intentionally removed or corrupted all of the psychology, social dynamics, and evolutionary tools that could have helped us.
McLuhan continues on, describing how the electronic man "seeks pattern recognition" in contrast to how the Gutenberg man sought distant goals. This also follows the logic of our current times where we are in frequent danger of deception and tribalism. There is so much information, the only strategy is to keep looking for the content that validates what you already think, and algorithms and artificial intelligence are extremely effective at feeding your biases and keeping you addicted.
Technology is not inherently bad, but there are pitfalls, especially when companies designing the tech are incentivized to harvest your attention and engagement. It's beyond the scope of today's newsletter, but I highly recommend listening to this podcast that explains further why this incentive is so dangerous: How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death - Your Undivided Attention Podcast
The Experience and The Meaning
There is one more fascinating insight that McLuhan offers to us as we think about our thinking and our experience in our technological environment of high-speed thoughts.
At present, electric speed may already have violated human scale, tending, as it does to transport man instantly everywhere. When you are "on the air" you are simultaneously here, and in many other places in a manner that is discarnate and angelic, to say the least.
As we are plugged into almost everything almost everywhere, information not only increases, but something happens to our own experience. McLuhan references a poet (I'm not sure who, specifically) who said, "we can have the experience and miss the meaning." He then takes the idea further:
In fact, such is the nature of experience that it is almost inevitable that we do miss the meaning. The "meaning" or the relation to ourselves of a particular event, may not come home to us until much later. However, with the instant replay of our own or others' experiences, it is now possible to have the meaning without the experience.
That's what gives me pause as I consider working and producing at the speed of thought. In all of the rush, we may still be communicating the meaning, but if we are losing the experience, does that not diminish the meaning at the same time? For example, I can be emotionally moved by a video about a tragedy that is occurring in the world, but if I immediately move onto the next cat video I'm presented with, the meaning of the previous video has been erased. I took no action, I immediately soothed my discomfort with entertainment.
Maybe moving at the speed of thought devalues the human connections that we are desperately seeking. The more we feel and then numb and then feel and then numb in such a relentless stream, the more desensitized we may end up.
Slowness seems to be the key to quality whether in thoughts, relationships, or learning. Slowness is a human need that conflicts with the human wants. How can we insert more slowness into our lives, given the environment around us encouraging the opposite? That's the question I'm thinking about a lot lately, and while asking a question can generate many instant thoughts, I'm waiting and working on them in the hopes that slowing down will help me find a quality answer to how to slow down.
It's not all hopeless, though. If McLuhan has demonstrated such a good grasp of what we're dealing with already, there is a chance that we, the public, may also have inherited a power previously unavailable to us. He says:
The mysterious thing about this kind of speed-up of information, whereby the gap is closed between the experience and the meaning, is that the public begins to participate directly in actions which it had previously heard about at a distance in place or time. At instant speed, the audience becomes actor, and the spectators become participants.
There are a lot of forces at work trying to keep the public in stasis; in equilibrium. There are a lot of dangers as people seek power and wield oppression to get more power. But maybe, just maybe, the broader public finally also has a chance to subvert the patterns of history. We don't have to be spectators who are only able to understand our situation at a distance. We are actors and participants more than ever before.