THE TECHNOLOGY OF A PEN AND A PIECE OF PAPER

All over the news, pundits are covering the advance of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, etc.  Most of them bemoan this new technological incursion.  The New York Time’s coverage seemed to be slightly unique.  It described scenarios where college teachers are requiring students to write, by hand, paragraphs in the classroom.  Teachers want verification that a student puts ideas together in their minds, and then outputs those ideas.  And a pen and a piece of paper is the technology selected to accomplish this.  

As the power of the machine becomes ever more insidious, we are realizing that we do want to know the provenance of the ideas that any of us come up with.  We want to be able to state that your concepts were generated with associations that occurred in your brain.  The prime reason for this cultural uproar is authenticity.  And this authenticity is quantified by how much of your associative reasoning was done biologically, rather than assembled for you.  

AI has, as we saw a couple of pages ago, made significant inroads into the visual domain with image producing apps.  And it will continue to make inroads.  It is obvious that in the not too distant future, you will be able to input a couple of parameters, and out will come a layout for a single family dwelling.  

I continue to believe that an increasingly important cultural metric will be the human provenance of your ideas.  This is why Transparent Drawing advocates the analogue technology of a pen and a piece of paper.  And I believe that greater value will be given to ideas and concepts where there was greater human associations and connections.  Pages herein, such as Provenance Quotient, and Design Blockchain, make crude attempts to provide metrics for this emerging cultural parameter.

The integration of perception and physical movement that occurs within a human being remains incredibly powerful.  In the end, it may be more powerful than what the machine can generate for us.  A pen and a piece of paper is the technology available to us to keep the human in the equation for as long as possible.