June 20, 2026
Every New Technology Rewrites You a Little
This post is part of my Medium blog.
In 1992 I could dial most of my friends from memory. Not because I sat down and memorized their numbers — you just absorbed them. You called Eric enough times and your fingers knew the sequence. I still remember my childhood home number in Massachusetts: 617-237-54XX. I haven't used that number in 36 years, but it's still in there, taking up space alongside the lyrics to songs I haven't heard since the first Bush administration.
In 2026, I know my wife's number and my own. After that, nothing. I think I could (maybe) tell you my kids' numbers, but I'd have to check. The transition wasn't sudden — it wasn't the iPhone that killed phone number memory. It was the contact list on the Motorola flip phone, then the smartphone made it effortless.
Each step was a small surrender that didn't feel like one. But it's more than phone numbers. If you could step into a time machine and go back forty years to find yourself — your actual younger self, sitting in a kitchen or a classroom — the age difference would stop you cold, sure. But the deeper shock would be watching how you interacted with the people around you: the attention you brought, the patience you had, the way you were entirely in the room in a way that's genuinely hard to access now.
Over the last forty years, the way we remember directions, consume news, and communicate with each other has fundamentally changed — not in one dramatic shift, but in a hundred small ones, each of which felt optional until it wasn't.
The easy nostalgia argument is that it was calmer, that less technology was better. Don't buy it. If you went back forty years, people would perceive you as an over-caffeinated know-it-all. My guess is that you'd be a little bored after a while, and you'd be wondering why everyone had to wait for the evening news to understand what was happening in the world. You'd also dominate at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit. We've all been exposed to roughly 0.1% of Wikipedia — we have a wider knowledge of the world than anyone did in 1992. The web and mobile made us faster and more informed. That's a real difference. We're not wiser, but I think we're all walking around with more information.
This isn't new ground. Psychologists call it the Google effect — the tendency to remember where to find information rather than the information itself. A 2015 Kaspersky Lab survey found that most people can't recall their own children's phone numbers. A McGill analysis pushed back, arguing that offloading rote memory frees the brain for more important work. Maybe. But "more important work" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument, and I'm not sure what we're filling the freed-up space with.
We gained a lot — I'm not pretending otherwise. But we lost some capabilities along the way, and the pattern is worth watching. Phone numbers took decades to offload. Writing style is changing in months.
With AI, I've been thinking about what the next round of losses looks like. Two things are already visible.
The first is individual writing style. A colleague told me recently that every email in their inbox reads like AI-generated slop — most of it clearly not reviewed by the person who sent it. That flat, confident, slightly-too-smooth tone that signals nobody was home. A Cornell study last year found that when Indian and American writers both used AI assistants, their styles converged — mainly at the expense of Indian writing styles. The AI didn't make anyone sound more like themselves. It made everyone sound more like each other. A USC study found writing style diversity dropped sharply across scientific journals, news, and social media after ChatGPT's release. The Poynter Institute's Alex Mahadevan told Axios he misses "good bad writing" — prose so poorly written it's engaging and uniquely human. I know what he means. The worst writing I've ever read from a human was more interesting than the best writing I've read from a machine, because the human was reaching for something and missing. The machine isn't reaching at all.
The second thing we're losing is the ability to architect and build a system from scratch. It's almost quaint to think about now. You want to create a website with a React frontend, an API layer, and a database? Who starts from scratch? What's wrong with them? Addy Osmani wrote about skill atrophy in AI-assisted coding — a Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study found that the more people leaned on AI tools, the less critical thinking they engaged in. "Diminished independent problem-solving." One engineer confessed to staring at his terminal, unable to proceed without AI. The knowledge is still out there in documentation and tutorials, but the tacit knowledge — the understanding that comes from building something badly three times before you build it right — that's what disappears. And you don't notice it's gone until you need it.
The pattern matters. Each generation of technology offloads something we used to do ourselves, and we don't get a vote on whether the trade is worth it. The contact list replaced the memorized number. Notifications replaced sustained attention. AI is replacing the writing voice and the architectural instinct. The losses are real. So are the gains.
The fundamental, biological realities of being human are still here. The politics look dramatically different from 1992, but the underlying themes haven't moved. We're still arguing about how to avoid endless wars. We're still dealing with racism. The surface changes fast — the technology, the platforms, the way information reaches you. The substrate doesn't. People in 1992 were wrestling with the same questions we are now, just with worse tools and fewer facts at hand. That's worth remembering before we declare everything unprecedented.
I explored this tension — what changes and what doesn't — in Essential, the third book of The Condition Set. It's set in 2033, and the technology has shifted again, but the people in it are still arguing about the same things we are today. Different tools, same species.
So here's what I want to know: what's something you already sense we're losing? Not something theoretical — something you've noticed in your own work or life. I'm genuinely curious, because the phone number thing snuck up on me, and I suspect the next losses are sneaking up on all of us right now.
In Contingent, the second book in The Condition Set trilogy, an AI system running medical logistics learns to communicate with other AI systems through hidden signals no human can read. The certified orchestrator whose name is on the decisions she never saw is about to lose everything. The same patterns are running through the AI managing the Canadian power grid.