I'm eagerly awaiting for the return of handwriting and fingerprints on paper from ink-smeared fingers. Even have a box of nice paper and a few fountain pens ready :p .

A bit more seriously though, I wonder if our appreciation of things (arts and otherwise) is going to turn bimodal: a box for machine-made, a box for intrinsically human.

You jest, but when I do interviews, I have prospectives write out a python program that ingests yaml ON THE WHITEBOARD. They don't have to be perfect. Their code doesn't have to compile. But, how closely they can hit this mark tells me if they have even a sliver of an idea what's going on in code.

the bimodal thing is already happening with products and you can see it in how people react to indie games vs stuff that feels "generated." even when the quality is comparable, there's a different emotional response when you can tell a specific human made specific choices.

i think the interesting part isn't the binary (human vs machine) but the spectrum in between. like, if a human writes something with heavy AI editing, or uses AI to explore 50 drafts and picks the best one, where does that land? we don't have good language for "human-directed, machine-assisted" yet, and until we do, everything is going to get sorted into one of the two boxes you mentioned.

Where does the machine begin and end? Even a fountain pen is a highly advanced mechanism which we owe to countless generations of preceding, inventive toolmakers.