Opening page…
Would you still write?
If every book you could ever write already sits finished on a shelf you can reach, do you still write?
A finished work may not replace the experience of bringing it into being.
Your answer
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A little context
Imagine the shelf is real. Every book you could ever write is already there, finished, in your best voice, a short walk from your desk. You could take one down tonight and read it. Would you still sit down tomorrow and write?
Nearby questions
- Mastery or possessionWhen something good comes out of you, is it yours — or are you the mouth for something you don't understand?
- Why did the Chippu paint the Deucalion myth at the Laurel Bridge?The Manager let one Chippu dress the Laurel Bridge. Under its fountain he painted Ovid's flood, where two survivors throw stones over their shoulders and the stones become people, and each time it ends he washes it off the wall and paints it again.
- Is a thing worth more because it was hard to make?We prize the handmade and the hard-won. If a machine made the same thing in a second, ask what, if anything, would be missing from it.
- When does an idea become yours?An AI gives you the same opinion it gives thousands of others. Is it yours?
- Can a machine have an original idea?Ada Lovelace wrote that her engine could originate nothing, only do what it was ordered to. Machines now turn up things no person has seen.
