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The paper computer « the jsomers.net blog

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Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc. If an email required me to review a draft, I'd love to mark up a print version on my couch, sans screen, and have those notes scanned and sent off as if I'd done the whole thing on Google Docs. The point is not to give up on virtuality, but just to save the end user from having to interact with it. It's great to be able to send information to anyone in the world instantly; but let me do it without the glaring screen and the thousand distractions. Is such a thing even possible? I'm not sure, but I just now uploaded a first draft of this post, handwritten in a small notebook, into ChatGPT. Its transcription was

The paper computer << the jsomers.net blog the jsomers.net blog. About Subscribe Read More Contact me The paper computer by James Somers , April 8, 2026 Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc. If an email required me to review a draft, I'd love to mark up

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