Augmenting Human Intellect is prescient in so many ways that it's helpful as an exercise to examine predictions which seem off. Collecting notes…
#1 (p13-17): DE paints a vision of word processing, describes how it'd help people develop ideas more rapidly and flexibly. (cont)
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He suggests that in competitive spaces, there'd be strong market pressure to adopt and improve augmentations like this (the implication is those who don't would get left behind).
It's striking, then, that some of the most successful writers draft by hand, or on typewriter!
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If Gaiman, Rowling, Stephenson, Sontag, King, etc can succeed without non-linear text editing, then it seems that either a) the augmentation must not be *that* transformatively powerful; or b) competition among top authors isn't that fierce, so "inefficiencies" can be tolerated.
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DE talked about the accelerating complexity of problems, I don’t think fiction writing falls within that category.. I’m pretty sure the speed at which we can explore new domains of knowledge has accelerated with all the infrastructure available (including Wikipedia)
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This is a good point, and my sense is that while there are adherents of handwriting/typewriting among non-fiction and memo writers, they are rarer than in fiction. That's an interesting signal.