A thought experiment in how human-AI roles and relationships may change in the future. From the Future of Being Human Substack.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a new study from MIT showing that the use of AI in research and discovery has the potential to increase productivity, but decrease the satisfaction that researchers get out of their work.
My article prompted a response from Mary Burns on LinkedIn where she asked “Where’s the satisfaction in being AI’s amanuensis” — and so began the seeds of the thought experiment below!
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, an amanuensis is someone who was historically employed to write down someone else’s work, whether through dictation, copying, or capturing their ideas in some other permanent form. For instance, a composer’s amanuensis might translate their creative vision into written musical notation.
While the formal definition of an amanuensis suggests someone who simply acts as a recorder, there’s a long tradition of people in this role having some influence over the creative process. As a result, the relationship between a creator and their amanuensis might look more like a collaboration — with the important distinction that the creator is primarily responsible for generating new and creative ideas, and the amanuensis is primarily responsible for the hard work of transforming these ideas in some concrete form.
And this is where Mary’s comment got me thinking — are we potentially looking at a future where the roles of humans and AIs shift, with AIs becoming the idea generators and humans becoming the equivalent of their amanuenses?
It’s an uncomfortable idea — although it does resonate with the findings of the MIT study. In fact, it’s such a challenging concept that it took some effort to explore it using text-based generative AI platforms …