Outstanding graphic artist Christoph Niemann recently published a textual/visual essay on AI art in the New York Times which is one of the most thoughtful, nuanced reflections I’ve seen on the topic. One of his points reminded me of this passage in The Typewriter Revolution: 

For a planet desperate for conservation, for a mind starved for concentration, inefficiency starts to look like nourishment and life. Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

It’s not efficient to cook a meal from scratch. 

It’s not efficient to ride a bike down a country path. 

It’s not efficient to learn an instrument instead of downloading a song, or to sketch a landscape instead of pointing your smartphone at it. 

Why do we do inefficient things? Because sometimes we don’t want life to be seamless—we want to feel resistance, we want to take our time, we want to savor the experience. When what you’re doing isn’t just a means to end, you’re in no hurry to get it done. 

For the typewriter revolution, writing is one of those intrinsically valuable experiences.

Here is Niemann’s reflection:

From Sketched Out by Christoph Niemann