The writes and the write-nots

I had the good fortune of spending my childhood summer vacations and formative teenage years at my grandparents’ house in Karachi, a white structure with a veranda bordered by archways, large windows, a terrace and a jamun tree which turned the road purple during the summer months.

Last October, I visited my grandparents’ home to help out with my grandfather’s funeral. I spent a lot of time looking over his library – columns of books which covered the walls in the lounge. When my brother and I were growing up, Dada (my grandfather) would sit at the dining table and read to us – the recurring names being Shakespeare (particularly excerpts from Hamlet and Julius Caesar), Ghalib and Iqbal.

I used to see him typing away on the now obsolete ‘PC’ on his desk, with his fountain pen next to his notes and freshly dried ink in cursive handwriting. He woke up at 4am every day, dressed in his usual safari suit or white kurta salwar, his shave always done. But among all these memories, the one vision that stands out is Dada, arched over his desk, writing.

My Dada, Mohammad Zafar, was not a famous writer or columnist. His primary occupation was the armed forces. He joined the army in 1954 and was a proud member of the 15 Lancers and the 28 Cavalry. However, the toils of his job did not hinder him from pursuing writing whenever he could. This is what makes him relatable to me. During the days of Dada’s funeral events, my grandmother showed me a file of some of his writings. I skimmed over 20 articles on the Pakistan Steel Mills alone. There were tributes and obituaries, one such written for Shahid Hamid after his murder. I flipped through the bylaws he wrote for the housing scheme where he resided. There were long-form articles on economic issues and current affairs, all published in Dawn.

Writing is hard. To write well, you need to think clearly, and thinking clearly is difficult. How and why did Dada write so much? I kept thinking as I read his writings, almost hearing his voice recite the text. Maybe because he could draw from so many seasons of his life – an army officer, a businessman, a university professor and a student of law and economics.

Maybe he had a lot to say because of what he had seen - migrating to Pakistan and losing so much of his family, starting from scratch, fighting in two wars, losing his youngest brother to war and the responsibilities of being the head of a family that everyone turned to. To understand Dada’s preoccupation with writing, I want to turn to the phase in my life when I wrote the most.

During law school, I took several humanities and literature courses. There were two opposing forces within me which created the pressure to write: the expectation of writing and the difficulty of doing it. The academic process involved labouring for hours to produce a thesis statement, reading multiple papers and book excerpts and ensuring a structure that made ideas flow and connect. No one was coming to save you from the effort of writing. Towards the end of my Master’s degree, I discovered AI and its ability to generate text with a simple prompt. I realised that almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

With Dada’s passing, I felt this looming pressure to write again. George Orwell, in his essay ‘Why I Write’, provided four potential reasons for writing: “sheer egoism” or for praise; “aesthetic enthusiasm” or the mere love of beauty; “historical impulse”, or to record facts and your impressions; and lastly, “political purpose”.

For Orwell, the last reason mattered most. The novelist Patrick Cottrell said he has to feel “borderline desperate” to write, and “going long periods without writing” feeds that desperation. This seems to hit home for me. While I oscillated between processing Dada’s death and getting distracted by the day-to-day cares of the world, the internal pressure to write again quietly built.

Paul Graham, an English-American computer scientist, very eloquently stated that with the advent of AI, the world will be divided into the writes and the write-nots. Those who like to write will continue writing. However, the gap between the writes and write-nots will grow because there will no longer be a spectrum of ‘good writers’, ‘ok writers’, or ‘people who can’t write’; there will just be writers and people who cannot write.

Why should we care? Many skills have become obsolete over the course of history. But there is something deeply troubling about a diminishing skill that is so close to thinking. To write is to think, and with generative AI, thinking is outsourced to an LLM. Graham argues that the “writes” and the “write-nots” will eventually become the “thinks” and the “think-nots”. In preindustrial times, most people’s jobs made them strong. Now, if you want to be strong, you exercise. In the age of AI, if you want to be smart, you need to write more often.

Dada had dementia in the last few years of his life. While the disease slowly took away his dynamic personality, I always tried to remember him in his element – sitting at his wooden desk in the early hours of the day, taking notes in his diary, referring to bookmarked pages in his books and writing. This is my attempt at emulating one facet of his personality.

“He was a man, take him for all in all.

I shall not look upon his like again.” 

– Hamlet - Act I Sc II

The writer is a lawyer working in data privacy and technology.