After the Everything Machine | Andy Matuschak on Patreon
This essay was written as a submission for Augment, a forthcoming anthology on the future of personal computing. I expect it will undergo more editing before wide publication, but I thought I'd share it with you all now. At the putative dawn of super-intelligence, I’ve been wondering: why is it that my computer has never been more powerful, more enabling, more capable of augmentation—and yet I've never felt so much aversion towards it? I've never lost so many days to displacement, distraction, dissociation. It's never been easier to spend all day in a fugue of busyness while meaningfully accomplishing so little. This has only become more true as AI has become more capable. But thinking back, even before modern AI: why is it that I, and so many of the computing pioneers I admire, have believed so passionately in the computer's potential as a thinking environment, when it’s often such a terrible place to think? When it’s often so much better to think with a pencil and paper? And then—whe