It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding agents to realise that it’s extremely useful and going to be similarly huge.
Resistance to change is not a virtue!
My position with the AI is almost the same. It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people. Moreover I do think all AI companies need to pay fair licensing cost to all authors and train their models to accurately cite the sources. If they want more data for free, they need to propose copyright changes retroactively invalidating everything older than 50 years and also do the legwork for limiting software IP to 5 to 10 years.
I don't think that's true.
I do most of my reading on a smart phone - including wading through academic papers, or reading full books in the kindle app and jotting down notes in the digital margins.
A sizable number of my short form blog entries are written on my phone, and my long form writing almost always starts out in Apple Notes on my phone before transferring to a laptop.
Predictive text and voice dictation has got good enough now that I suspect there have been entire books written on mobile devices.
Whether you want to consider it "deep knowledge work" or not is up to you, but apparently a lot of Fifty Shades of Grey was written on a BlackBerry! https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/fifty-shades-of-gr...