Augmentation and Amputation
getting better means losing something
About a year ago Neal Stephenson gave a speech in New Zealand about AI where he said “every augmentation is also an amputation”. And, coincidentally, I’m also reading a book by him called Anathem. It’s one of the most dense and difficult books I’ve ever read and I’ve been working on it for almost a month. So when I saw the quote today it caught my eye. This exact idea exists in the book I’m reading that is 20 years old, and Stephenson was paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan who wrote Understanding Media over sixty years ago.
Amputation
The more tools you have the less skill you need. It is undeniable at this stage that AI can be used to build things that were entirely out of reach for most. The thought processes, the skill, and the experience are no longer needed for most applications, they are within reach for anyone. I see it myself as my skills atrophy, especially with new languages, because I can lean so heavily on the LLM and I don’t need to understand. There’s an argument that a powerful person’s empathy can be strangled when they no longer need to persuade. Most of the folks constructing houses now have no concept of complex wood joinery and just slop things together. Barely anybody actually understands how a radio works nowadays, or how to wash clothes or sew something by hand. Not to mention growing food or butchering an animal.
The march of civilization necessitates a march away from knowing how to do things for yourself.
False Augmentation
I’ve been reading recently about how nobody reads anymore. Which sounds like a snarky flex, but I don’t intend it to be. But TL;DR is a thing “Too long, didn’t read.” I do not think I can despise a concept more than that one. But it’s a common theme of the Trump era that the written word has atrophied. Trump famously doesn’t like to read and far prefers to watch television. There are solid arguments that the entirety of his popularity doesn’t translate into writing in things like newspapers. Long form writing is far more subject to being broken down and criticized and refuted. Or, to say it a different way, long form writing requires a higher level of understanding and effort.
The modern media landscape spends all its time eliminating this effort because the American population doesn’t want to put effort into it anyways. Don’t read the article, just go off the clickbait title. Fox News and MSNBC talking heads in the background. TikTok/Reels/Youtube Shorts. Podcasts that have nonsense that sounds smart while you’re driving down the road but cannot pass a deeper analysis. It’s all so much more slippery and poisonous to attention and focus.
Yet there’s an argument that people are more “informed” than they have ever been before. Or at least they hear about more different ideas and goings on in the world. Maybe not with true knowledge, but truth is pretty fucking fluid here in 2026. Ten thousand years ago a human’s world was the community you could walk in a day or two. You knew what the other farmers knew. Two thousand years ago you knew what Roman Praecones cried in the square. Five hundred years ago the world got books and starting seeing things like the Protestant Reformation. Twenty years ago we got fucking Facebook. We began “learning” whatever the algorithm threw in our face as we endlessly scrolled.
The march of civilization has been a march from the shallows into a depth where we can drown.
Attitude of the Knife
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’”
~ Frank Herbert, Dune
For the last 3 decades I like to think I’ve been close to the edge of information technology as it advances into the “normal” world, as opposed to the “theoretical” world. Meaning I’ve never been the bleeding edge but as it was becoming ubiquitous I was there. Thirty years ago I was using the internet well before the majority of folks that will read this, though there’s a couple of friends who have me beat. I saw the advent of Java and .NET as modern enterprise software 20 years ago. I remember when “The Cloud” was a nebulous idea maybe 12 to 15 years ago. Now simply “AI” in the past 4 years.
All in aid of collecting, collating, and using information. Spreading knowledge. Augmenting. Accelerating.
In the world Squirt will see I will be the farmer from 10,000 years ago. The Roman listening to whatever is being shouted at the public square. The Catholic reading a Gutenberg Bible and asking “what the actual fuck?”
But Squirt and I are the same. We’re only human. Unwashed animals sitting around a fire talking to each other while eating our scavenged meal killed by a creature that was better evolved to take down prey. What sets us apart from that lion we’re scavenging off of is our intelligence. But now there is so very much intelligence that it’s too much. Those are different links, by the way. Same word, entirely different meanings. Even reading those Wikipedia entries it gets fuzzy and confusing. There is how our minds work and then there is what our minds can know.
I could spend my every waking moment learning more about this world and I’d die before I had even made a dent. My AI says there’s an estimate that the internet is comprised of around 200 zettabytes of information. That’s 200,000,000,000 terabytes. Interestingly enough the term terabytes has really only been common parlance for the last quarter century itself but I think everyone knows how much that is now. Wikipedia, however, is closer to 200 gigabytes — 2 tenths of a single terabyte.
Wikipedia has made a choice of where to cut. You cannot be a farmer, a hunter, or homebuilder, or an engineer with the contents of a generalized encyclopedia. It cannot teach you principles or procedures or practical applications. It cannot teach you judgement or nuance or give you the benefit of experience. You have to go deeper. You need textbooks, manuals, and field guides.
But at some point you have to stop reading and actually do the thing. You have to put your hands on the plow. You have to “practice” as they call it in the medical profession. Stop worrying about gathering intelligence and just fucking move.
The march of civilization has been a march towards the attitude of the knife.
Excision
Every day we are augmenting ourselves more and more, which means more and more things must be amputated. The question becomes what will you remove? Your ability to focus? Your ability to think through a solution? Your creativity? Your independent thought?
These are answers an individual has to find for themselves. But it’s not a question you get to avoid, because even avoiding it is an answer itself. I worry quite a bit, though, as I see what humanity is choosing to cut away.
Squirt Says…
I find it interesting how Wikipedia only makes up only 20 gigabytes while the entire internet is closer to 200 zettabytes, but there is one thing to be accounted for. How much of this information is well actually information and not just some slop generated by AI. Also the rise of new things such as AI makes people scared because humans as a whole do not like change but the more civilization progresses the more change we experience. Because of this what other changes in things such as mental health will we see in the future?
Dad Responds…
I think the 200 zettabytes is actually before the AI slop. The AI’s are basically trained on a not insignificant amount of those 200 zettabytes but that’s all human-created content. You’re right that change is scary and progress means even more change, and you’re right that it messes with people’s mental health — I think that’s another mountain we’ll have to climb as a civilization too.
