![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/00024791-1038x778.jpg\")
\n Illustration by John Holcroft \/ Ikon Images<\/p>\n
\n Illustration by John Holcroft \/ Ikon Images<\/p>\n
Not long ago, in a bid to become even more insufferable, I finally got rid of my smartphone. I\u2019ve already proselytised enough to friends about the benefits \u2013 increased concentration span, better sleep, bizarrely thick hair growth \u2013 so I won\u2019t go into all of that here. Something less obvious I\u2019ve noticed, though, is just how much less dominated my life now is by\u00a0language.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been a great amount of fuss made lately about modern technology\u2019s supposedly deleterious effects on literacy, from this viral Substack<\/a> by James Marriott<\/a>, to an essay in this month\u2019s Baffler<\/a>. But the last few weeks have made me wonder if, paradoxically, we should be more worried about the opposite: our smartphones bombarding us with\u00a0too many\u00a0words, and thus making us, in an admittedly limited sense,\u00a0hyper-literate, with no real sensitivity to the subtleties of human experience beyond that which can be cleanly expressed in code.<\/p>\n Before ditching my iPhone, my days were a nonstop blizzard of words: news, podcasts, YouTube videos, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, Wikipedia, books, magazines. True, even without it, I still spend a decent chunk of my time reading, writing, listening, and thinking \u201clinguistically\u201d. But what made the smartphone particularly pernicious was that it plugged every last gap in the day where I might otherwise have had a brief moment of respite \u2013 from\u00a0words. Even walking between rooms in my flat, I\u2019d reflexively get out my phone and find some kind of text to scroll through. Some days, the longest I\u2019d go without engaging with language was a few seconds in the shower.<\/p>\n Things are rather different now: I can happily take a long bus or train journey without having to find some text to hook my mind onto. This has taught me a couple of things. First, just how much language reshapes our sense of reality, by peeling us away from the here and now \u2013 very simply, we confuse the map for the landscape. Second, and by extension, that this confusion distorts our understanding of\u00a0intelligence\u00a0\u2013 and thus blinds us to how different\u00a0human\u00a0intelligence is from current approaches in AI.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no revelation<\/a> that language, and the written word in particular, abstracts us from the world around us. This, to bastardise the philosopher Gottlob Frege, is because the most fundamental aspect of language \u2013\u00a0what the words actually mean \u2013is not something actually situated in time or space. A \u201cmeaning\u201d has no physical shape or location. Nor is it restricted to any particular moment or event: if I write you a letter, the words don\u2019t stop meaning what they mean while it sits unread in the postal van between our houses. The meaning is something quite separate from the ink the words are written in, or the mind deciphering them.<\/p>\n For philosophers, this has represented a longstanding puzzle. For everyone else, it has concrete psychological implications. The more time we spend with words, the less we\u2019re actually \u201cin\u201d the world around us: our minds are, as it were, operating on a different plane, navigating an invisible network \u2013 a bit like those diagrams that show satellite beams or internet data floating phantasmically over the Earth. We can think of language, in fact, as the very first social network \u2013 a parallel world we retreat to in our heads, ostensibly to connect with others, but one which makes us gradually lose contact with the world immediately in front of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the age of LLMs, this seems like a double problem. We have become deadened to the uniqueness of non-linguistic experience at the precise moment when machines are beginning convincingly to mimic our expertise with words. As AI gets better, something that still genuinely sets us humans apart is the way we\u00a0experience\u00a0the physicality of the world around us, and\u00a0feel the strange, continuous, seamless passing of time. There\u2019s good reason to suspect, indeed, that our intelligence\u00a0emerges\u00a0from these worldly facts. But we are increasingly blinded to this aspect of our existence by the unending assault of words, words, words.<\/p>\n
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