So I’ve been thinking a lot about résumés lately and I think one of the reasons why I might have such a vendetta against them is because of something I’m going to call “the shortcut game.”

When I say “shortcut” here, I mean anything someone can at least semi-truthfully claim that will encourage people to make positive assumptions about them. For example, when we say someone went to Harvard, we use it as a shortcut for saying they’re smart and competent and qualified, because those are things we generally believe about Harvard grads.

The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me, not because I’m worried about the future of writing as a career – that has been slowly dying for decades anyway - but because writing is the process of figuring out what you actually think, and that is a skill that is slowly dying.

I found 1984 to be an extremely disturbing novel, because the premise involved slowly limiting the types of thoughts the populace was able to have by limiting their language. I can’t help but worry that we’re headed on a different, more insidious path to the same end result.