A second brain for writers

Google has introduced a new online utility for writers and students that promises to be a powerful think-know tool.

I probably don't need to remind people who pay attention here that I've had a long-standing interest in "Tools for Thought." In fact, looking for a better typing tool led me to understand that we were entering an era of mind-amplifiers when I was a young writer, 40 years ago. I had been using typewriters for the first decade of my writing career, upgrading finally to the state of the art IBM Selectric. But after finishing a page and marking it up, sometimes resorting to scissors and tape, inevitably I had to retype it. My first book proposal was accepted by an editor who wanted me to rewrite it, but I declined the offer because I couldn't face retyping it.

In the early 1980s I found my way to Xerox PARC and talked my way into a contracting writer gig -- heaven! I could use an Alto with a screen and a three-button mouse, sending my documents to a laser printer over the ethernet, and storing them on a 5 megabyte hard disk the size of a large pizza box. Even when I wasn't writing for Xerox, I drove to Palo Alto most days to use the Alto. Through PARC I met Doug Engelbart and found out exactly why these were truly mind amplifiers and not just  better typewriters. My tools for a decade were a telephone, a typewriter, and a library card. I had been riding a horse and buggy and now I had my own spaceship with a personal computer and the Internet. I used the tools I wrote about.

A few decades later, bandwidth and databases made possible sophisticated tools for organizing information, combining sophisticated search, tags and folders, multimedia, and mindmapping. If you haven't checked out Jerry's Brain, I recommend it to see how a thoughtful person recorded and inter-related nearly half a million chunks of thought, information, and knowledge for nearly a quarter century.  I used the same service, The Brain, to organize the syllabus of  a course on "Think-Know Tools" I taught over a decade ago.a

In 2005, the wonderful writer Steven Johnson wrote a column for the New York Times titled "A Tool for Thought" (and generously name-checked my 1985 book) regarding the way he was using DEVONthink for his writing research. The tool makes it possible to type or drag in snippets or entire documents, tag and/or folder them, and build a database that used ai-like association to provide different views of your research and writing (Johnson likened this to "jamming with myself). When you enrich your Devonthink database with enough information, you can interact with it, and get suggestions regarding connections.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about using the new kind of "Large Language Model" based artificial intelligence service as a writing tool. Since then, we've seen the advent and rapid development of conversational AI "chatbots."  I was excited to learn that Johnson had been working with Google to develop a thinking tool for writers:

NotebookLM, the AI-powered tool for thought I've been building with Google Labs for the past year or so, officially launched to users in the U.S. on Friday. If you were in our early access program using NotebookLM earlier this summer, I highly recommend that you check it out again. The early access version was mostly our attempt to learn as much as possible about source-grounded AI. In other words, it was more of an experimental feature, not a product. The version that launched on Friday gives you a genuinely new interface for working in collaboration with a language model, creating a single, integrated space for reading, thinking, asking questions, and writing. Some of the most exciting features—what we call "suggested actions"—are going to be rolling out over the next week or two. But the main architecture is in place—and NotebookLM is now using Gemini Pro, Google's new AI model.