>Writing has always been a great burden. It should not be elevated to, nor equivocated with, some great utility or intellectual practice. That was for an era where sound was harder to record and transmit than words; and where meetings required moving around the world.
Okay Socrates[1]. Obviously writing has not been a "great burden" because it's 5000 years later and we're still all doing it. It hasn't been enough of a burden for you to avoid this place after 14 years and 12331 karma.
The way you've carried yourself on this thread indicates to me that you either don't understand other people's relationship to writing and why it is better than speech for them, or you are simply unempathetic.
> Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication.
Unless you have an intellectual disability, you can pay enough attention to the written word to get what you need out of it. Speaking is just as much a skill as writing. Who hasn't been in a meeting where the speaker is so boring, dull, or just bad at communicating that we zone off, go to another tab, and end up missing details? At least with writing I can go back and see what I missed. I can check myself.
I have ADD and a speech impediment. It is harder for me to pay attention to someone speaking, especially if they are boring, than it is for me to pay attention to a document. If I skim a document and miss something, it's all still right there in front of me. I can buckle down and read the whole thing. I can't replay a conversation. And vice-versa. With writing, I can gather my thoughts, think through what I'm trying to say, and present everything at once as a complete package that can stand on its own. Who hasn't lost a train of thought... or forgotten the word for something... or has a foggy brain and can't seem to remember an important detail? With writing, all of those things happen in the process of creation and get pruned out and fixed in the process of publishing (I use this word loosely).
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The other thing I really wanted to comment on is the wild idea that is somehow okay for your manager to take your work, pass it through an LLM, and then present it to others as if it was your work. Like, what?!?!
I don't know what model you're using but AI lies. It lies all the time. It has no understanding. OP shows that because the AI generated overview of his work was full of hallucinations. The fact his manager didn't come back to him and talk to him about his documentation and offer feedback is crazy. AI came and gave everyone a taste of a lighter workload and instantly adults with 20+ years of experience unloaded their minds and started acting like vessels.
If I was that manager, I would be deeply embarrassed and ashamed.
So you prefer writing. Either way, writing is dying. It's dying because speaking and meeting can now be transmitted as easily. This itself should, empirically, demonstrate the point. The podcast killed the book, the meeting killed the memo. All around us writing is dying, and writing no one wants to read even more quickly.
Soon, in my view, writing will be seen as an instrumental intermediate artefact for technical or creative workers which is rarely shared and rarely read by anyone else. In other words, all writing will become checklists and scripts. Just as books became podcast scripts, and memos became meeting agenda.
I believe this is because writing and reading was, and is, a great burden to many. If you have some other explanation, so be it. It won't change the direction of the culture.
Prepare, I guess, to read more transcripts.
> the meeting killed the memo
Some AWS meetings require the memo.
> writing and reading was, and is, a great burden to many
Other terms for writing and reading:
> read more transcriptsTranscripts are primary sources. Sufficiently valuable primary sources can inspire new sources, created by humans through a process that includes, but is not limited to, reading and writing.
Another way of looking at that is that if writing is dying then doing it well will become a key competitive advantage. Organizations with culture, processes, and hiring standards focused on effective written communication will be faster and more economically efficient than competitors that rely on meetings (or recordings of meetings). Really crisp writing is especially helpful when prompting an LLM.
Sure, it will become a more elite creative and technical skill.