I teach academic writing to first-year college students. As the academic year ends, I am planning modifications to the course before it is offered again to a new set of students this July. The consensus among college teachers seems to be that, on an average, students who are coming to our classes today, though a lot more confident, are struggling with basic college-level reading and writing tasks. One aspect of the struggle is coming from an overreliance, even dependence in some cases, on freely available generative AI that provides summaries of readings assigned in the syllabus along with the written homework. When urged to do the work on their own, students ask, from a place of genuine confusion, why they need to learn to read and write when there is technology to do it for them. My task this summer break is to figure out how I will convince my students why they need to learn how to read, write, ask questions, and formulate complex thoughts in sentences, both written and spoken. I am also thinking through my own growing aversion for all things AI at the same time. In early 2023, when students first brought ChatGPT-generated essays to my class, I was among those who wanted to figure out what instructional role it could play in a writing classroom. But from then to now, curiosity has become dismay as generative AI is forced on all my computing devices and made impossible to comprehensively disable. The cost of even casual AI use is running up expensive bills for the environment, for the socioeconomics of human resources and contributing to the spiralling mental health crises among young adults – to name just a few. I cannot find a single reason to voluntarily use this technology in my line of work. After all, the stated goal for my class is to learn how to close reading others’ work and experience the joy of exploring new things to say through the process of writing in response to readings. For this, all I need in my classroom is printed text, paper, pen and one dictionary.To state the obvious, writing needs technology and support. Think of the immense leaps reading and writing technologies have taken from rock-cut inscriptions and handwritten manuscripts to everything that made print and digital reading and writing possible. I am of the generation that learned to form the alphabet with chalk on a small wood-rimmed slate. We got ruled notebooks and pencils before graduating to fountain pens in school. College essays were written and graded by hand. I took lessons in ten-finger typing in a small steno shop near my university when I was gifted a typewriter that sounded a satisfying ding at the end of every line. The idea was to type out the fair copy from the copy of the essay written by hand. Composing while typing was difficult because it was cumbersome to correct errors or change a line of thought mid-way while typing. With the word-processor came the possibility of moving text around in a document with the cut-copy-paste functions. This was possibly the most enabling support I have had from a writing technology. Writing truly became a process of thinking through; I went from rough and fair copies to the idea of revising multiple drafts. For me, as for many others, writing happens in the process of revision. Word processing allows me to rewrite and tweak till I am satisfied by what I have learned of my own thinking process. Other innovations of the decade of the 2000s made reading and writing mobile, quicker to sort through references, file formats became easier to work with, with cloud storage one stopped losing working drafts as one did in the early days of word processing. Working collaboratively on the same document online is godsend. The ability to work with audio and video media expanded the ambit of my work. It was the age of agile thinking and creative exploration of multi-modal communication. If a student copied a part of their essay from sources without attribution, there was reliable technology to detect plagiarism and deter further cheating. Reading, writing and learning together gave me and my students a sense of accomplishment. Our smart classrooms made us collectively smarter. It was empowering. In other words, technology, up until generative AI and now AGI, were tools for readers and writers to do the work they do. It kept human pace. Processes and genres of human writing have been evolving with the technologies of writing. So why is generative AI not just another writing tool? Because it does your work for you. AGI, a technology that makes even generative AI prompting unnecessary, is aimed by its developers to outsmart and replace humans in the likely places of livelihood even as students are getting ready for it. Those that stand to directly profit from it are calling this the next industrial revolution. It recalls what F.W. Taylor did for the management of labour in factories to optimise profit for the few. Human labour was mechanised in the service of machines. That the same is being envisioned for the human intellect is an unmissable parallel. AGI marketing repeatedly uses the word deployment to refer to AGI use. Deployment of course is military vocabulary. Those that are listening can’t but hear the military-industrial assault of the tech oligarchs built into generative AI that does the homework for students, the research work for scholars and writes it all up in seconds. Actual learning, its processes and insights are being replaced by a false sense of efficiency, and accomplishment that is primed to crash. Generative AI is also profoundly alienating in being infinitely validating of its users, whatever they may say or do. Those who now turn to generative AI for all their queries and tasks, including in times of emotional distress, are possibly turning less-and-less to peers, friends, teachers, family – other people. Over the last year, there has been a noticeable drop in students voluntarily coming to office hours and many are reluctant to go for peer support programmes. Perhaps now I have a clue as to why. What does all this mean for my classroom? Reading and writing in the context of literature, arts, social sciences and even the sciences is about engaging with the ideas of other people. This engagement with others requires the investment of one’s self in giving physical time, energy and attention to reading and writing. The emotional-intellectual work of comprehending ideas, the creative-critical analysis of texts and the eventual synthesis of all that one has read and thought about in distilled prose is ultimately a transformation of the self. One does not stay the same person going in as coming out of a deeply engaging project of reading and writing. For this work of whole-hearted reading and embodied writing, all I need is printed text, paper and pen in my classroom. I need students to talk to each other and me. I need the classroom to be a place of unhurried time. Why? Because students deserve room to trust their own thoughtful intelligence. Anannya Dasgupta directs the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy at Krea University where she is also a faculty in the Discipline of Literature.