WHY ANALOGUE THINKING STILL MATTERS IN THE AI ERA

Is AI mightier than the pen? Perhaps it depends on context. Or perhaps there’s no conflict at all.

Because there’s mounting evidence that fountain pen wielders are often the heaviest users of digital intelligence.

Author and analyst Azeem Azhar - who built a 12KB personality for his AI agent and extracted 146 behavioural patterns from it - does his core thinking with a fountain pen on A4 landscape paper. 

Alpha Schools - which uses AI tutors and produces average SAT scores 40% above the US national average - makes students solve problems with fountain pens on paper.

Some of our colleagues at Brightbeam have similar habits. To-do lists, for instance, seem to get done quicker if they’ve been hand-scribed.

So it appears that many people pushing hard into AI are also drawing sharp lines around which habits to maintain. 

And this has nothing to do with nostalgia. Whilst delegating more, we sometimes discover that certain forms of thinking can’t be transferred. 

And we might expect ‘Analogue Mode’ to persist when making new, final and complex decisions - underwriting judgements, clinical assessments and compliance recommendations come to mind.

Human cognition - and analogue methods - will likely continue to earn their keep in these key moments. Perhaps providing further confidence that digital intelligence is effective - and correctly deployed - elsewhere?

In the meantime, here’s today’s in-the-end-at-the-end. Penned by human fingers connected to a meat-based brain whilst using a mobile phone.

The maturity of your digital adoption might ultimately be measured by the work you’ve chosen not to hand off - and the reasons why you made those choices.