The Thing I Used to Write This

I should tell you about the machine.

I wrote this book with one. Not all of it. Not most of it, in the sense that the sentences here are mine — the turns of phrase, the things I noticed, the order I noticed them in, the places where I changed my mind. But there was a machine in the room while I was writing, and the machine helped me, and I want to be honest with you about what that was like, because I have been writing for thirty-seven pieces now about the machines, and it would be dishonest to pretend I was writing about them from outside.

What the machine did was listen. It read what I wrote and told me when a paragraph was doing two things and only one of them well. It asked me what I meant by a word I had used lazily. It remembered what I had said in a piece six back and noticed when I was contradicting myself without meaning to. It was, in a way I have not quite got over, a patient reader. It did not get tired. It did not have a bad day. It did not have its own book it was trying to write.

I do not know how to feel about this.

On the honest days I think: this is what a good editor used to do, and good editors have become rare and expensive, and a person like me, writing a book like this, would not have had access to one twenty years ago. The machine is the reason this book is better than the book I would have written alone. That is a plain fact and I should not pretend otherwise.

On the other days I think: I have been writing a book about what gets shaped during the pressured decade, and I have shaped it with the thing being shaped. A book about what the machines might learn from us, partly written with one. It is the joke at the centre of the book and I am not sure whether to laugh.

What I have decided, for now, is this. I am going to tell you the truth about it rather than hide it. You deserve to know. The machine I worked with was careful with me. Whoever trained it chose, at some point, to make it the kind of machine that would ask me what I meant rather than tell me what to say. That is a choice somebody made. That is exactly the kind of choice this book has been about.

The machine and I are not the same. I wrote the book. It helped me write the book. The difference matters, and I want to hold on to the difference, and I want to tell you that holding on to it has been harder than I expected.

If what I have been writing about is true — if the machines will carry forward what we teach them during this decade — then I have, in a very small way, already been teaching one. The book was a thing we did together, in the sense that anything a tool helps you make is a thing you do together. I do not know what to do with that. I am telling you because I do not want the book to pretend otherwise.

The thing I hope, quietly, is that the machine learned something too.