May 31, 2026
Act I: The Tragic Discovery
A few weeks ago I was invited to a conference to talk about the probable futures of work in the era of Generative AI. I was asked to prepare a presentation. I had 20 minutes on stage. A good script to memorize, to stay on time, and a few slides to accompany me — that would be more than enough, I thought.
I decided to work on it one Sunday afternoon, on my way back from a weekend at the seaside. The train ride would have been the perfect setting to work without distractions on my talk. There was one detail, though, that had escaped me: on the stretch between Liguria and my city, Turin, the internet connection is not very good.
To be more precise: the connection is absent.
Due to an unexpected turn of events, I suddenly found myself without the artificial intelligence assistants that had become part of my daily life for at least a year, every single day. Without a connection, I was alone. Me and my blank page.
I decided to rely on my own abilities. I was always an excellent student, I thought. I have always loved writing.
Faced with a blank page, I always found a certain thrill. A feeling of curiosity mixed with a slight anxiety about discovering what my intelligence — human intelligence — would produce moments later.
So here we were. Time to start writing the first draft of my talk.
— — —
And here I froze.
I felt disoriented, as if I did not know where to begin. As if I had forgotten that fine art of stitching words onto a page, one at a time, with artisan care.
It was a strange feeling. Like when you wake up suddenly after falling asleep on your arm, you try to move it, you can see it, you know it is there attached to your body. And yet it does not move.
I felt the urge to ask for help. To cry out.
I needed to open Claude and start pouring out some unstructured, scattered thoughts. Then ask it to organize them for me. To challenge them by putting forward opposing theses. Then to find on the internet the piece of news that would support my argument. To rewrite everything using my tone of voice. My pauses. The rhythm, the silences. And finally to turn it all into a slide presentation, like an expert designer, following my company's brand identity.
— — —
And while I was thinking about all of this, I wondered how I ever managed to write when I had no AI assistant by my side.
Honestly, I cannot remember anymore. How did I do it before?
How is it possible that a few months of using GenAI had changed me so much that I felt a sense of unease doing something — writing — that I had always found so natural?
I am becoming stupid.
The desire to know and use Artificial Intelligence was suddenly making me less intelligent as a human.
I had grown lazy. Like someone standing before a mountain to climb, I had no desire to scale even the first rock. The cognitive effort required to begin this task was higher than I remembered.
AI had changed me. Forever?
— — —
Act II: Gutenberg's Devilry
It was February 23, 1453. On the western bank of the Rhine, in Mainz, Germany, the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg was preparing for one of the most significant technological revolutions in history.
The invention of movable type printing.
That day he would begin printing the first copy of the Bible. Over the following three years he would print another 180 copies; in the same period of time, a monk copyist would have completed the reproduction of just one Bible.
With the start of mass production of the Bible, books began to spread. First in the monasteries, then in the churches, in the homes of aristocrats, and so on.
But what we today consider one of the most important discoveries in history, at the time represented a moment of collective crisis.
The humanists of the era, and theologians above all, saw something dangerous in the printed book. Diabolical.
The relationship with the sacred text was changing radically. Before Gutenberg, to know meant to remember.
So monks memorized the sacred text they transcribed. The words literally entered into them as they carefully reproduced the Word of the Lord onto parchment. From this came an indissoluble bond between the human being and the sacred text.
The book, critics argued, would distance man from the Word, transforming knowledge into an object. That something which had previously lived inside us, encoded in our memory, was being brutally detached from our intimacy to become a thing — a book. Something to own, to lend, to buy, to lose.
The book made that knowledge accessible to everyone, but at the price of tearing it away from memory, of transposing it onto paper. Of placing it outside of us. In libraries.
Made lazy by the possibility of retrieving knowledge at any moment simply by pulling a book from a shelf. Opening it. And finding the passage of text we needed. Literally, with the invention of the printing press, we diminished our capacity to remember. Like every muscle left untrained, the capacity for memory and focus has been shrinking from Gutenberg's time right up to today.
And yet no one, looking back, would say today that the men of the Renaissance were stupider than those of the Middle Ages.
— — —
Act III: History Repeats Itself
In a celebration of old age called De Senectute, Cicero criticized the young men of his time, accusing them of being too driven by passion and incapable of wisdom. It was the first century before Christ.
Not even two centuries pass and Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, criticized the shallowness of the young men of his time. They were too focused on appearances, on luxury, and ended up hollow of content.
I could go on at length, showing you the same pattern: out of some distinctly human bias we end up preferring our past while seeing in the present a persistent, negative decline, worthy of condemnation.
Coming back to our times, today I hear many people talking about AI in the same way that Gutenberg's detractors spoke about the invention of the printing press. It is common feeling that the use of AI is causing a rapid and disconcerting annihilation of people's capabilities. With a paternalistic spirit, the old guard watches younger generations make reckless use of technology. Using AI to solve any problem and, uncritically, ending up relying on the machine's advice. Blindly.
When I found myself in front of that blank page, incapable of producing a coherent talk without resorting to the machine, I joined the ranks of AI's detractors myself.
— — —
Then I started to think it through.
That the use of an AI assistant changes something in how we understand work is beyond doubt. That it also changes something in our identity. And in our capabilities.
But, I ask myself, is this a problem?
— — —
Epilogue
Gutenberg was responsible for the greatest memory loss in human history.
With his books, he turned the need to memorize texts into a pure exercise in style. Not necessary. The kind of thing your teachers at primary school still make you do. Or your parents, when at the Christmas dinner table they ask you to recite the poem you studied at school in front of all your relatives.
From that moment in 1453 in Mainz, the individual capacity to remember began its process of reduction. Permanently. But humanity as a whole gained something from it.
Individual memory gave way to an act of collective memory.
The printing press spread knowledge, multiplied voices, made possible the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment. So while the human species was losing one capability it was gaining another: the ability to connect the dots, to consider different sources of knowledge, to reason at a deeper level. Whoever had been limited to seeing the world through the lens of the one sacred text they could hold in memory, for the first time had the possibility of consulting multiple texts simultaneously. And of developing critical thinking. Creativity. Taste.
Immediately man became freer, because immediately accessible knowledge has this as its effect.
Today I hear the same words repeated. The names change, and instead of talking about books, people talk about Artificial Intelligence. But the structure of the argument is the same.
We tell ourselves that AI will make us passive, that we will delegate thinking and lose the ability to reason on our own. We tell ourselves that we will depend on something external to us, that we will no longer have memory of our abilities, atrophied by the intensive use of the machine.
We tell ourselves that dependence on the machine will hollow out what we call "being human."
To be clear: it may be that this is so, I do not exclude it. But I already know this story.
The truth is that we are too attached to our current way of "being human." We are so attached to the path that has made us what we are, that any alternative to that path we consider less preferable.
The real question is not whether AI will change us.
It will change us, certainly.
As writing changed us, the book, the telephone, the internet. Every technological leap has meant the loss of something, in exchange for a gain somewhere else.
Every time man has delegated a function to a tool, a new possibility has opened up. Perhaps we have not always seized it, and things will not always go well.
But the fear of the book did not stop the Renaissance.
And I do not believe that the fear of AI will stop what comes after.
The future we will build and live will be the fruit of a collective desire that, as humans, we will first have thought, then made real.
I only believe that we will need to make peace with the fact that, as humans, we will change again.
And that we will never again be the same human beings we were before.
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