Writing Acceleration and the Future of Writing

Book chapter, 2026

Writing is a technology, that has been evolving for more than five thousand years already (Daniels & Bright 1996; Robinson, 2009). Historically, it is a process that involves skillful gestures for composing a sequence of characters into a text. It has been developed throughout several millennia, and begun as a craft, by careful engraving on different surfaces and materials. Since the advent of digital writing, there has been an increase in writing production, and with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), a noticeable imbalance has arisen between input text and generated output text. A single sentence provided as input can generate several hundred or several thousand words when fed to an LLM. Before the 2020s, digital writing systems could autocomplete individual words, maybe up to a few words, but this noticeable imbalance between input and output text is what I refer to as writing acceleration.