> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math.
This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all.
Ancient bards were learning and reciting day-long epic poems by just hearing them. There are still cultures that train themselves to long recitations of text. I don't even know what that might feel like to have such a long sequence readily available in your brain.
But training our brains requires massive energy. Depending on individual and social characteristics people will stop training their brains when the going gets tough. Math is a great example. You could argue that chatGPT has a job because our public information repositories are so littered with low-density information (unstructured textual information) that its impossible to navigate. Some professions would go to great textual length to describe in an ambiguous and limited way something that can be described concisely with an equation.
Superficially at least, the impact of digital assistive tech is that we are being collectively dumbed down (just like we are becoming obese through the ready availability of massive amounts of fatty foods). Its a multi-pronged process: Before chatGPT decimated our writing skills, visual dissemination of information (which conveys less meaning but requires no training) has taken over like a raging wildfire. E.g., tiktok versus twitter.