Thinking Aloud on the Eve of the End of Thinking

This morning I scrolled through the wars, the filth, the entertainment, and the religious news that YouTube lays out like a breakfast buffet in a psychiatric institution run by advertisers. Human misery and divine certainty, all available before tea. The preferred expression of our times seems to be a mouth opened considerably wider than its owner’s understanding.

And somewhere between these efficient deliveries of the human condition, I began wondering what would happen if thinking disappeared.

An excellent concern for a man who has more immediate problems. I am fifty-one, unemployed, in poor health, and financially equipped for approximately none of the circumstances in which I find myself. My own life requires repairs for which I have neither the money nor much dependable energy. Naturally, I woke up concerned about the future of human thought. The roof is leaking in the metaphorical sense, and the tenant is considering the future of architecture.

This blog, which few humans seem to read, is where some of that considering happens.

It is an unremarkable thing, really. My thinking aloud. There is no institute behind it, no benefactor, no impressive desk from which I issue findings to a grateful civilization. There is me, in a rented room in Calcutta, trying to put into words something that will otherwise go on knocking around inside my head. The bots seem more dependable than the readers. I picture them arriving with their little digital shovels, industriously collecting the droppings of a man who cannot make a living from the brain producing them.

I am not an encyclopedia. There are mistakes here. Facts I get wrong, connections I stretch, sentences in which indignation reaches the destination several minutes before the evidence. I try to correct what I discover. Being human does not make an error sacred, and being sincere does not make it true. But a person attempting to think in public has to be allowed to arrive imperfectly, provided he is prepared to be corrected. Otherwise the only people left speaking will be the ones too stupid to doubt themselves and the ones being paid not to.

God knows we have enough of both.

Writing is where I find out what I think I think. A thought can feel magnificent while it is still a warm fog inside the skull. Give it a sentence and suddenly it has a limp. Give it a paragraph and you discover that half its relatives are frauds. You stop. You go back. You find that the thing you were so confidently condemning was not quite the thing you meant. Sometimes you discover you do not know enough to finish.

That unfinishedness is what worried me this morning.

You reach for something. An uneasiness, a contradiction, a suspicion that two apparently unrelated things are connected. You have not found the words. You may not even have found the question. Then the machine supplies a beautifully proportioned paragraph, and there it is, apparently: your thought, washed, dressed, and ready to meet people.

It is like trying to remember a dream while someone whispers a different dream into your ear.

The supplied version may be better expressed. It may contain something useful you would never have considered. It may also lead you away from the awkward little thing you were trying to catch, and you may never notice, because the substitute is so much easier to hold. You recognize enough of yourself in it to accept the whole parcel. The original thought, which had not yet learned to stand, goes quietly missing.

How would you count such disappearances? What instrument measures a question that was almost asked?

I use AI myself. I ask it to help with language, to check things, to argue with me. There is work it helps me do when my own energy is scarce. But I want to remain present in the work, able to say: no, that is not what I meant; you have made it smoother and lost the bloody point. A useful assistant should be able to survive being told that. So should the person using it.

I remember wrestling with books. The stubborn paragraph. The word you had to circle. The argument you disliked before you could explain why. Reading let you stop halfway through a sentence and live there for a while. You could go backward. You could spend an afternoon acquiring one small understanding that nobody else would have considered a productive use of an afternoon.

Now I can ask for the argument, the counterargument, the historical context, and a version suitable for a reasonably intelligent potato. There is real help in that. I have needed explanations myself often enough to have no romantic attachment to remaining baffled. But somewhere I still have to turn the thing over in my own head. Recognizing an explanation is a wonderfully convincing impersonation of understanding one.

And then I think about the children.

What happens when the answer starts arriving before they have had much practice forming a question? When the difficult minute is always shortened, the blank page always filled, the irritation always relieved before it develops into investigation? A child could finish the assignment and still miss much of the work by which the assignment was supposed to change the child. The page improves. The marks may improve. Everybody is delighted with the page.

Who is looking at what happened inside the person?

An AI tutor can ask a child to explain a step, offer a hint, make room for another attempt. It can also hand over the whole solution. That difference matters far more to me than whether the box has been decorated with the word “education.” We have already had generations of schooling in which reproducing the approved answer was mistaken for possessing a mind. We do not need to automate the misunderstanding at a scale that makes the old system look artisanal.

Nor do I imagine my generation was a golden republic of independent thinkers. I have lived among us. We could memorize an entire chapter without permitting a single sentence to inconvenience our beliefs. But I worry about what happens to the opportunity to learn otherwise. If you grow up with somebody always finishing your sentences, when do you discover the sentence you would have made them wait for?

A thought that lasts, that catches in another person’s mind and makes them think, often needs a long, untidy preparation. Education helps. So do nourishment, conversation, books, experience, and enough room in a life for these things to meet. No university has a monopoly on this. People without degrees notice what credentialed idiots spend careers overlooking. But nobody’s mind ought to have to do all its growing while its owner is frightened about the next meal.

People occasionally confuse having no job with having leisure. Unemployment supplies hours. It does not necessarily supply the ability to inhabit them. An afternoon spent calculating what you cannot pay is an afternoon with its throat held shut. You can sit perfectly still and be exhausted by the work of being afraid.

I write from inside some of that exhaustion. Bipolar depression and anxiety are already quite capable of making thought painful without assistance from Silicon Valley. I do not need more mental noise. I need the chance to follow something through the noise, to discover whether it amounts to anything, to put it somewhere outside myself where another person might examine it.

That takes a kind of sustenance we are remarkably willing to withhold while delivering lectures about individual potential.

And yes, there is mortality mixed into this. I am fifty-one and feel older than I should. Poor health and financial precarity make the future feel less like an open road than a series of doors through which I may or may not fit. I have no financial cushion, no public standing that opens those doors, no obvious way to assemble a second beginning out of what is available.

I could disappear between two ordinary mornings. So could any number of people from my generation and the ones beside it, people still noticing things, objecting, writing letters, explaining why a policy hurts, trying to give public shape to some wish for how life might be lived. Some have power. Some have scarcely more reach than I do. Most will leave no grand intellectual estate. A few pages. A remembered argument. An observation somebody else might have needed.

There is something quietly appalling about how much thought can vanish with a person before it ever finds another mind.

One such disappearance scarcely registers. Multiply it. Then ask what conditions we are providing for the people who come after us to develop voices of their own.

Will they get time to flower? Will they get fed? Will anyone tolerate their clumsy attempts before offering them a finished position? Or will we give them an interface that can produce a thousand eloquent opinions while leaving them less certain of what they themselves wanted to say?

This is where truth wanders back into the room, that old, badly dressed companion of mine.

When I was younger and still expected to get somewhere, saying what I believed was true did not generally improve my popularity. People could be extremely enthusiastic about honesty until it became specific. Then there were concerns about my attitude.

I still care about it. Truth, I mean. The effort to get something right, including the unpleasant possibility that getting it right may require giving up a conviction I enjoyed. It has not made me prosperous. It has not provided agreeable company or paid the rent. But I am reluctant to surrender even that awkward allegiance for the comfort of a paragraph that agrees with me in excellent English.

A machine can produce agreeable nonsense. So can a man. I have done my share. The question is whether I am still doing the uncomfortable work of noticing.

Perhaps one of the few humans who reaches this page will disagree with something here and stay long enough to work out why. Perhaps they will find the question I have failed to articulate. That would be a reader. That would be company of a kind. The bots can collect the words; I would like somebody to interrupt the argument.

For now, I am going to make tea.

I remain a crusty, bitter man with an unfinished life and a head full of thoughts, some of them probably wrong, some of them scarcely thoughts yet. AI can offer to complete the sentences. It cannot have lived the morning from which I am trying to extract them.

Truth has followed me into the kitchen. It has brought no groceries and offers no useful advice about the electricity bill.

I reach for the tea and find myself returning to the part I still cannot quite explain.