Dinosaurs

Imagining a post-literate future

First, there was a new series on Netflix titled The Dinosaurs. It’s a mostly AI-generated four-part pseudo-documentary about the rise, domination, and fall of the dinosaurs over a period of 165 million years in Earth’s prehistory.¹

Then Sam Kahn posted about what’s gone wrong with fiction.

Then you took The New York Times quiz, in which you were asked to choose between excerpts from well-known authors and AI-generated passages, and found that you preferred the AI writing three out of five times.

You put those things together and let your imagination run wild. Fiction appears to be in decline. Literary fiction, the kind that challenges readers to think, is especially at risk of extinction. Visual media has almost completely taken over from the written word. Educational standards in the United States have declined significantly so most of the population doesn’t care to read, and when they do read they barely understand what they’re reading. Men already don’t read. Most published books sell only a few copies. AI writes better than most people, and as well as many writers. Writers can’t make a living from writing.

When your head stops spinning, finally, what comes out is a question:

What if creative writers go the way of the dinosaurs and become extinct? What does that world look like?

Okay, two questions. Evil twin is not a mathematician.

It’s fascinating to imagine an Earth ruled by ancient reptiles.² No people. Few mammals. Some of the dinosaurs grew to nearly 100 feet in length and weighed up to 90 tons. Alien visitors to our planet would have seen nothing like the Earth we know now. And they probably would have turned around and left, and written our world off as not worth bothering about.³

And if it wasn’t for the rogue asteroid that hit approximately 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs might still rule Earth today. But they don’t.

No species ever thinks it might go extinct. Civilizations rise, thrive, and dissolve. Few people imagine their end.

Written language began about 5000 years ago. Creative writing probably started soon after that, as scribes copied down myths and stories. Publishing and the mass distribution of the printed word is only a few centuries old. The Internet is only a few decades old, and it threatens the printed word. AI is only a few years old and it threatens everything that has come before.

Technology and systems, and the way humans adapt to them are constantly changing. When a technology or system no longer serves the way we live it becomes obsolete. Remember fax machines? Eight-track tapes?

Once you could ride the subway or take a trip on an airplane and at least some people would be reading books. When was the last time you saw someone reading a book on a plane or a subway?

According to the NYT, a majority of people were like me and preferred the AI-written text. We are changing and we may not even realize it.

If the dinosaurs could disappear after eons of existence, what makes us think we can’t? Think of artificial intelligence as a Mount Everest-sized asteroid hurtling toward the creative writing planet at 20 times the speed of a bullet. When the dust clears, what will be left?

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Imagine a world with no books and no printed matter. No Kindles. No text on our computer or phone screens. Just images, videos and audio files. Signs along the highways and in airports, stores, and instruction manuals would only contain graphics. Learning and communication would be accomplished entirely through visual and audible media. Many people already live like this. We creative writers cling to our books and keyboards. But each new generation relies less and less on these things. Keyboards may actually become a thing of the past, as we can speak to our computers and they transcribe what we say.⁴ Even the people who once wrote millions of lines of code to create apps can now simply speak to their AI agents and tell them what they want them to create, and then sit back and watch it happen.⁵ Perhaps at some point we’ll be able to stick a device in an ear while we sleep or work at other tasks and assimilate knowledge without having to read.

Ignore, at least for a moment if you can, the vested interest that you have in your creative writing career. What would your life be like? You would do something else. You might try painting or pottery making or dance or acting. Instead of reading you would watch or listen. The adaptability of human beings is such that if writing were never invented we might not miss it. We would communicate in other ways.

The tendency for those of us who are immersed in creative writing is to think that if we lose that part of our culture we will be moving backward. But perhaps this is not so. Already we are seeing arguments for other types of intelligence that claim they are as valid as literate forms. In fact there are many cultures that existed for thousands of years without the written word. The Inca empire comes to mind. North American native cultures also did not have written languages. The Ainu people of Japan.⁶ Each of them was able to thrive without written language, maintaining their culture through oral tradition. If you think in terms of evolution, a species or a people continues to adapt until they reach a point where change is not necessary. It may be a temporary situation (although it can last for thousands of years), but they have reached a point of stasis. They have adapted as well as possible to their environment, and if they can do that without a written language they are successful at survival. Think about our culture. We are still constantly changing, adapting, fighting among ourselves for priority. Is this survival? Is it harmony with our environment? We often use words to divide ourselves. In oral traditions the spoken word seems to bring people closer together by reinforcing beliefs through myth and legend. Obviously there are a lot of other factors involved, but maybe those cultures realized something that we haven’t.⁷

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Sixty-six million years ago a T-Rex may have looked up to see a brilliant flash of light far off in the distance, thought nothing of it and went back to hunting a triceratops. A short time later it and most of its fellow dinosaurs were gone. They never knew what hit them.

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I am not saying that this future will happen. But it could happen. I know this imagination is pretty far out there—it wouldn’t be quite that easy to abandon 5000 years of writing. But the idea is fascinating, and I think important to consider in light of cultural changes and the almost unfathomable pace of change we are experiencing with AI.

I’ll leave it at that and look forward to your comments.⁸

PS: Traveling again this weekend so responses to comments probably won’t happen until Sunday or Monday.

1. I call it pseudo-documentary because while the science is fairly sound, the graphics are a little clunky and at times ridiculously anthropomorphized. Too many of the dinos tend to look as if they are having human thoughts like desire and terror and jealousy. But then what did I expect with Steven Spielberg involved?

2. For the record, the word dinosaur actually means “terrible lizard,” a term popularized by early scientists. But later fossil evidence showed they were archosaurs, a different clade of reptile with a distinct evolutionary ancestry.

3. I suppose they might do that now as well.

4. As I am doing right now.

5. Just as an example, to create the image that accompanies this post I described what I wanted to ChatGPT. I didn’t have to spend an hour scouring royalty free photo sites the way I used to (and besides, where was I going to find a crowd of dinosaurs?). I didn’t have to manipulate the image in Photoshop. It gave me exactly what I wanted with no effort at all on my part. I felt a little guilty that I didn’t have to donate a couple of bucks to one of the amateur photographers who post their work on those royalty free sites, but the AI is so darn easy to use that feeling soon subsided.

6. It’s hard to find a definitive resource that lists non-writing cultures around the world. But here is a start.

7. I’m not saying that the direction in which western civilization has moved over the centuries is all bad. The scientific method we have developed to question and test our theories and beliefs has propelled our culture toward verifiable truth. I could go on at some length about the negative effects our culture has produced, particularly against non-western cultures, but I think most of us know what they are already. (Yes, it’s another side-step.)

8. A footnote about all the footnotes: I suspect some of you may find all these footnotes annoying or self-indulgent. I suspect some of you may think I am some kind of David Foster Wallace wannabe. For better or worse, this is how my mind works. It is always digressing into tangents that may be a little off-topic but I feel are apropos to what I’m writing about. Plus they are fun to write. You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.