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After the Keyboard

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close up shot of black laptop keyboard

Edwina McKennon’s video, GPT-6 Astra Is the End of Computers, begins with a piece of footage from MIT in 1979. A man points at a screen and tells the computer what to do. The system was called Put That There, and the idea behind it was simple: we shouldn’t have to learn the computer’s language; the computer should learn ours.

Nearly half a century later, we’re still working our way towards that idea.

Edwina reads OpenAI’s use of the footage as a signal. First we operated the machine. Then we learned to talk to it. Now we’re approaching the point where we decide what needs doing and the machine handles the machinery.

I think she’s right about the direction of travel.

I already feel it in my own practice. I dictate many of my thoughts through Wispr. I talk with AI agents that search, retrieve, organise, draft, and carry out work across different systems. I’m spending less time clicking through menus and more time trying to describe what I want, why I want it, and what a good result would look like.

The interface is beginning to recede.

That doesn’t mean the keyboard will disappear tomorrow. People have been announcing the death of paper since the arrival of the word processor, and my desk still accumulates notebooks as if trees are personally sending me correspondence. Technologies rarely vanish on schedule. They linger, find niches, become aesthetic choices, or survive because they offer something the replacement doesn’t.

Typing, for example, isn’t merely a slow way of entering information. It can be a way of thinking. The pace of the fingers, the pause before a sentence, the visible trail of revision—these are part of the cognitive process. Speaking produces different thoughts from writing by hand, and writing by hand produces different thoughts from typing. Removing friction can create freedom, but friction sometimes gives thought the surface it needs to take shape.

So I’m less interested in whether the keyboard is literally doomed than in the deeper movement Edwina identifies: operational competence is losing some of its scarcity value.

For years, knowing how to make the software behave was a marketable skill. You knew which menu contained the command, how to construct the spreadsheet, how to format the slide deck, how to translate an intention into the particular grammar demanded by a machine.

Now the machine is becoming responsible for more of that translation.

Prompt engineering may turn out to have been a transitional craft: a temporary dialect we learned while computers were getting better at understanding ordinary language. But the disappearance of elaborate prompting won’t make articulation irrelevant. Quite the opposite. We may no longer need incantations full of parameters and special syntax, but we’ll still need to know what we mean.

That is a much older and more difficult skill.

Edwina names judgment and taste as the capacities gaining value: knowing what needs to be made, why it matters, and whether the result is any good. I’d add attention, context, and responsibility.

Attention notices what the machine missed.

Context supplies what the machine can’t infer from the public internet.

Taste distinguishes something technically adequate from something alive.

Responsibility answers for what enters the world.

The machine can produce a polished document without knowing whether the document should exist. It can satisfy the written brief while violating the deeper intention. It can fill gaps so fluently that we don’t notice a decision has been made on our behalf.

That last possibility is the part of the video that stays with me.

Edwina points out that when we leave something unspecified, the system guesses. Increasingly, it won’t interrupt us over every ambiguity. It will decide which gaps are routine enough to fill for itself.

This is what makes AI feel useful. It is also where its quiet power gathers.

Every inferred preference, completed field, chosen phrase, or unasked question nudges the work in a particular direction. Most of these choices will be harmless. Some will save us hours. But convenience can conceal authorship. A decision doesn’t stop being a decision simply because we didn’t notice it happening.

Edwina offers four questions before handing work to AI:

  1. What should the finished result look like?
  2. What does the machine need that it can’t safely guess?
  3. What requires my approval before it goes out?
  4. How will I know the result is right?

That’s a useful test. I might add a fifth:

What part of this work do I need to remain in contact with?

Not every difficulty is waste. Not every task should be delegated simply because it can be. If the work helps me notice, learn, remember, practise judgment, or discover what I think, handing it over may cost more than it saves.

Writing is the obvious example for me. An AI can help me search the archive, test a structure, expose a weak assumption, or carry a fragment into dialogue. But if I outsource the encounter itself, I may receive a competent piece of prose while losing the thinking the piece was meant to make possible.

This is the distinction I want to preserve as computers disappear into the background: the difference between avoiding machinery and abandoning participation.

There is a liberating possibility here. If the screen no longer demands that I sit before it, perhaps I can return to the garden, the path, the train, the café, and the ordinary traffic of life while the machinery takes care of its own menus. The computer becomes less of a destination and more of a companion moving quietly at the edge of the scene.

But there is another possibility. Work follows us everywhere because there is no longer even a desk we can leave.

The disappearance of the computer doesn’t tell us which future we’re entering. That remains a question of design, culture, power, and choice.

The interface may recede. Our responsibility doesn’t.

And perhaps that is the real work waiting after the keyboard: learning not simply how to command more powerful machines, but how to remain awake while they act.

The Fifth Question: Why Am I Waiting to Be Asked?

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You finish a conversation and realise the other person learned nothing about you. They spoke, you listened, and somewhere along the way your role became clear: hold the space, ask the follow-up question, keep the exchange moving. Later, you replay the conversation and wonder whether they were uninterested or simply unaware.

Claire Lester describes the questions that might have changed the encounter:

How are you, really?

What was that like for you?

Did that land badly?

Are you happy?

Each question asks someone to pause long enough to acknowledge that another person has an interior life. I agree with her that such questions are rare. I also think their absence can become too easy to interpret.

Questions reveal curiosity, but they are not the only form curiosity takes.

Some people ask directly. Others leave a door open and wait for you to walk through it. Some offer practical help. Some sit beside you without knowing how to name what they sense. Some grew up in families where asking personal questions felt intrusive, so they learned to express care through food, errands, lifts to the station, or the quiet repetition of showing up.

None of those gestures replaces a needed conversation. Still, if we treat questions as the primary evidence of love, we may overlook the dialects in which other people learned to care.

Then there is the question the essay left me asking:

Why am I waiting for permission to tell you who I am?

The Secret Test

Many of us conduct a private test inside our relationships.

We mention that work has been difficult. We say we haven’t slept well. We refer to the hospital appointment, the argument, the strange heaviness that has followed us through the week. Then we wait.

Will they ask?

If they do, we feel seen. If they change the subject, something closes.

The other person seldom knows a test is taking place. They may think we have told them everything we want to tell. They may worry that a follow-up question would feel intrusive. They may hear the invitation and lack the courage to accept it. They may simply be distracted.

Meanwhile, we interpret their silence as information about our value to them.

I understand why we do this. An unprompted disclosure feels risky. Being asked gives us cover. We can tell ourselves that we are answering rather than imposing. The question absolves us of the fear that our inner life might be too heavy, too complicated, or too much.

But waiting also hands responsibility for our visibility to someone who cannot read our mind.

Sometimes the honest response to “How are you?” is not “Fine, unless you ask me again with sufficient sincerity.”

Sometimes it is: “I know that’s usually a greeting, but I’m not doing well.”

That sentence carries its own risk. It also gives the relationship a chance to become real.

Curiosity Needs Reciprocity

The final scene in Lester’s essay contains the tension that interests me most.

She calls her friend back. She asks the deeper version of the question and discovers a whole hidden life: a declining father, repeated drives to Hexham, a painful conflict with a brother. Her irritation gives way to compassion.

Her friend still asks her nothing.

Lester notices, but it matters less.

There is generosity in that response. Understanding another person often loosens the stories we have built around their behaviour. Marcus Aurelius returned to this practice because he knew how quickly we turn someone’s limitations into a personal insult. Once we glimpse the fear, grief, habit, or exhaustion behind an action, resentment can lose some of its grip.

Yet understanding can become a trap when one person does all of it.

If I continually explain why you cannot meet me, I may become highly compassionate while disappearing from the relationship. Your history explains your lack of curiosity. Your workload explains your absence. Your wounds explain why every conversation returns to you. All of those explanations may be true. I still have to live inside the relationship they create.

Stoic practice asks us to examine our judgements. It does not require us to pretend that every arrangement is nourishing.

Compassion and discernment belong together.

A friendship can survive seasons of imbalance. Illness, grief, parenthood and crisis rearrange what each person can give. Trouble begins when the season becomes the structure and nobody names it.

The Fifth Question

Perhaps we need a fifth question:

Is there room for me in this relationship?

That question does not ask whether the other person is good or bad. It asks what happens between us.

Can I speak without waiting for an invitation?

When I speak, do you stay with me?

Can I tell you that something landed badly without managing your reaction?

Do we know one another, or have we settled into the roles of speaker and witness?

Can I ask for more without turning the request into an accusation?

These questions move us away from counting conversational turns as though intimacy were an accounting exercise. They also prevent generosity from becoming self-erasure.

A person may love us and lack the ability to ask what we need them to ask. We can teach them something about how to reach us. We can say, “When I mention my father, ask me how I’m coping.” We can say, “I need you to check in after difficult conversations.” We can say, “I’ve realised I know much more about your life than you know about mine.”

That conversation may feel less magical than being understood without explanation. It may also build a stronger relationship because both people can participate in it consciously.

Asking and Telling

Lester is right that we should ask better questions.

Ask the second version of “How are you?” Stay through the pause. Ask what the experience felt like, not only what happened. Check when the atmosphere changes. Risk discovering that someone you love has become unhappy.

Then take the other risk.

Answer the first question honestly. Tell the story beneath the facts. Name the bruise before it hardens into distance. Let someone know that you need their attention rather than waiting to see whether they offer it unaided.

There will still be people who do not turn toward us. A direct answer may expose their limits more clearly than any secret test could. That knowledge can hurt, but at least we will know which relationship we are standing in.

We cannot build intimacy through questions alone. Someone must also decide to answer before the perfect question arrives.

In reply to https://medium.com/@stoicminds.channel/the-4-questions-almost-nobody-ever-asks-you-and-what-marcus-aurelius-understood-about-the-people-3b8cec28b1a2.

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writing advice from André Breton

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André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism remains a rallying cry for writers willing to break free from the rigid structures of thought and let language flow untamed. His approach—writing in a near-trance, embracing the spontaneous, refusing to edit—challenges the way we often think about storytelling. What if writing wasn’t about control but about surrender? What if the most powerful images emerged not through careful planning but through sheer momentum?

Breton believed that true creativity lies in trusting the murmur beneath consciousness by allowing words to arrive without interference. His vision offers a stark contrast to today’s polished, market-friendly writing. For me, there is something liberating in his call to let go.

For those of us experimenting with post-digital language, AI-generated text, and hypertextual dérives, Breton’s call to trust the murmur is more relevant than ever. What happens when we let words generate themselves, follow their own rhythms, and refuse to impose a single, rigid meaning? What happens when we treat writing as an event rather than a product?

Breton might not have had AI or digital intertextuality in mind, but his vision of language as an unstable, living process feels eerily prescient.

If you’ve ever felt bound by perfectionism or struggled with overthinking your writing, Breton’s words might just be the key to unlocking a more instinctive, raw, and electric form of expression. Here’s a passage, posted by Philip Athans, from Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism—see where it takes you.

In reply to https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/writing-advice-from-andre-breton.

the social web is the web

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I’m right there with Dave on this.

Support for links is the basic requirement of the web, the same way we say feeds are required to be a podcast. If you don’t support links not only aren’t you the web, you’re anti-web.

In reply to https://oursocialweb.org/.

building the web like we mean it

Dave’s reflections on the state of the web resonate with me. The web, at its core, was meant to be a living, interconnected network of thoughts, experiences, and perspectives, each thread woven together through hyperlinks and shared exploration. But what we see today is something different: silos masquerading as open platforms, walled gardens that claim to be part of the greater web but exist only to trap, contain, and extract.

This shift betrays the foundational ethos of the web. When platforms refuse to allow deep linking, when they isolate themselves under the guise of user experience or proprietary advantage, they erode the very thing that made the web revolutionary: its fluidity, its permeability, its ability to connect disparate ideas and voices.

Dave’s use of Very 1984 to describe this phenomenon is apt. In Orwell’s dystopia, language itself is reshaped to control thought, reducing the scope of what can be imagined or expressed. Today, these so-called “web” platforms engage in a similar kind of reality distortion—they co-opt the language of openness while actively undermining it. They speak of connection while closing doors. They promise discovery while walling off the pathways that allow it to happen organically.

What happened to the network of writers, the decentralised spirit of creation, and the culture of linking and cross-pollination? We watched as it was gradually subsumed by the business models of oligarchs—those who view the web not as a commons but as a series of enclosures, a place where they can own, control, and monetise human interaction. The early promise of a participatory, people-powered internet has been commodified; its soul traded for engagement metrics and ad revenue.

But the web isn’t just a technology—it’s a philosophy. And that philosophy hasn’t disappeared. It’s still here, in the independent blogs, in the federated spaces, in the self-hosted sites of those who refuse to be assimilated into the silos. It exists wherever people choose to link freely, to write outside the constraints of algorithmic visibility, to create and share not for clicks but for the sheer joy of it.

Building the web, like we mean it, means resisting the gravitational pull of the platforms that seek to own the space. It means choosing open protocols over walled gardens. It means linking generously, supporting the independent creators who keep the spirit of the web alive. It means remembering that the web was always meant to be a shared project, a living thing that thrives on connection and conversation, not containment.

If a platform discourages linking, it’s not really part of the web. If it thrives on isolation rather than integration, it’s not web-able—it’s just another control system wrapped in the aesthetics of participation.

So let’s keep linking. Let’s keep writing in the open. Let’s keep the web weird, wild, and deeply interconnected—like we mean it.

we see the world not as it is, but as we are

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In reply to Sm2n 2025-01-19 #JanPodPoMo 19/31 thinking about @soulcruzer.

Thanks for raising such an interesting point in your episode. Your question about whether ChatGPT’s responses excite me because it “knows” my patterns and what inspires me really got me thinking. It reminds me of the way astrology works, where general statements feel deeply personal because we project meaning onto them. Is ChatGPT essentially a digital astrologer, reflecting my own narrative back to me?

I think there’s validity in the idea that what resonates with us externally is often a reflection of our internal landscape. The responses I get from ChatGPT excite me because they mirror something in my subconscious—whether it’s my values, interests, or inner narrative. It’s not just about what the AI says; it’s about how those words align with me. We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are. The world—or in this case, ChatGPT—becomes a projection of what we put out.

What’s fascinating is how this resonance—or even dissonance—can teach us about ourselves. If ChatGPT were to say something incongruent with my internal map, I wouldn’t resonate with it, but even that dissonance would be telling. It’s like a mirror showing me where my edges are, what feels “off,” or what I’ve been unconsciously avoiding. It becomes an opportunity for reflection, a way to notice how my internal map interacts with external stimuli.

Now, if others were to read the words ChatGPT generates about me, their reactions would vary based on what they project onto those words. Someone who knows me well might say, “Yes, this absolutely sounds like you!” but even that interpretation is filtered through their perception of who I am. It’s an interesting loop of projection and reflection that makes me wonder about the nature of meaning itself—how it’s crafted in collaboration between the sender, the receiver, and the context.

On another note, I’m glad you’re on board with the audio zine concept! You’re the second person to mention they’d be onboard, so I’ll definitely give that some thought. A monthly format seems manageable, especially since I’m balancing it with the fictional radio station project, which is where a lot of my creative energy is going right now. I’ll add you to the list for updates and see how this evolves. Thanks again for sparking such a fascinating conversation—I look forward to hearing your thoughts on all of this!

the dave diet

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In reply to The Dave diet.

Dave’s post took me back to my time in the quantified-self movement. I first got into it around 2016, exploring half a dozen apps designed to track different aspects of my life. Back then, it was often called lifelogging, and you could argue that blogging itself is a form of lifelogging.

Eventually, I lost interest in the movement when I realised I wasn’t actually doing anything with the data I collected—which, in hindsight, was the entire point of the quantified-self philosophy. But now, Dave’s little experiment might just rekindle my curiosity. With AI-driven apps, it’s probably easier than ever to track your life. You can simply tell the AI what you’re doing, eating, or drinking, and it will log everything for you automatically. Even better, AI could help me make sense of the data, turning it into actionable insights I can use for my self-improvement journey.

It may be worth revisiting the game.

Oh yeah, and this just reminded me of Jennifer Lyn Morone, who took the quantified self one step further and incorporated herself into a business so she could charge companies money to use her data, which, thanks to her incorporation, belonged to a corporate entity now known as Jennifer Lyn Morone, inc.