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When we think about reading, we tend to picture books, or magazines, or business reports. Blocks of text, traversed from beginning to end. There’s another kind of reading, though, one which I think we do much more often without really noticing it.

It’s a kind of instantaneous scanning of a word or two at a time: the hour on a smartwatch, or the label on microwave dial, or the URL in your web browser. I like to call this interfacing, because it’s less about digesting information (or experiencing the text) than about interacting with your immediate surroundings. You don’t think of it as reading at all — it just happens.

But if coders are more upbeat, it's because their encounters with A.I. are diametrically opposite to what's happening in many other occupations, says Anil Dash, a friend of mine who is a longtime programmer and tech executive. "The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you," Dash says. "And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you."

When something gets cheaper to do, we don't just pocket the savings — we do more of it. Though it could also be that these software jobs won't pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren't as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn't as challenging.

I mean a portfolio as a body of work that proves your value beyond your work history. A collection of artifacts that show how you think, just like creative professionals showcase their design or artistic work.

We can fully attend to only one thing at a time. Multitasking is an illusion. Task switching is expensive. To write well, you need to protect your focus. You either write, structure, or format. Avoid doing everything at once. You'll write better, and enjoy it more.

Il prezzo da pagare quando smettiamo di fare certe cose è che perdiamo anche la capacità di farle. La sociologa e psicologa Sherry Turkle, che studia l’evoluzione delle tecnologie digitali dagli anni settanta, scrive che voleva educare la figlia all’empatia. "Sapevo che senza la capacità di passare del tempo da sola, in silenzio, sarebbe stato impossibile. Ed è proprio lì che gli schermi hanno cominciato a crearci dei problemi. Appena c'è uno schermo la nostra capacità di ritagliarci dei momenti di solitudine s’indebolisce".

Affidare il proprio lavoro creativo o intellettuale a un modello linguistico di grandi dimensioni è forse l'esempio più estremo di come si vuole ottenere il prodotto finale saltando completamente il processo. Ma nell'istruzione il prodotto non è il compito, il voto o la media finale: siamo noi.

Dovremmo uscirne più informati, più capaci di pensare criticamente, più competenti nel nostro campo di studi. Gli studenti che cominciano a imbrogliare i professori finiscono per imbrogliare se stessi.

All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived. Only the sense of what was gained remains. It's in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

When you're following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone.

In other words: The more you organize your analog life, the less appealing you'll find the digital alternative.

If this is true, then maybe the thing social media companies fear most is not some newly-powerful application-blocking software or impossibly strict regulation, but rather a good old-fashioned daily planner.

We've been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn't real innovation.

The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. "You can't stop progress" is a very convenient argument when you're the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.

We've internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But "inevitable" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?