I’m convinced my friend Stephen is becoming more like his alter Hemingway ego with age. Maybe I am, too.

It had been ten years since we last saw each other. Twenty before that since we were sharing late nights on Student newspaper at Edinburgh University, pumping out pages of writing in time for the presses to roll. Some of it was quite good writing.

But back to Hemingway.

I called our firm NoTosh. Quite literally, it means: ‘no nonsense’, if you’re in polite company. And I didn’t even come up with it. My wife did, naming companies one of her many talents, apparently.

Stephen, meanwhile, has written what I believe may be the finest long-form feature about fake Irish priests in Japan that I’ve ever read. Yes, he was the priest.

So over lunch in Madrid, in the only acceptable bodega in Atocha, we caught up as if it had been only last weekend. He’d been up late shipping a piece, because he’s an actual writer. You know the type. The ones who don’t use CrapGPT to do their thinking for them.

We talked about the struggle of doing nothing for weeks before a deadline. The peculiar horror of looking like you’re not working, while your brain quietly moves furniture around in a dark room. Then there’s the momentary joy of shipping, swiftly followed by the regret of not finessing that one line. That one. Yes, that one.

We observed how vermouth manages to override the desire for Name-of-the-Rose-style self-flagellation about it all.

And we talked about caring for our work, our friends and our families so much, while somehow giving very little care indeed for the fools who seem to run things around us.

It was a lunch about writing. Which means, of course, it was a lunch about thinking. Because writing is not the typing bit - the typing bit is the receipt.

The real work has already happened somewhere messier: in the walk you took because you could not bear to sit at the desk any longer; in the sentence you deleted because it sounded too clever; in the argument you had with yourself and lost; in the pressure you put on yourself when something is not yet right, but not yet wrong enough to give up completely.

That pressure is what makes writing - and thinking - great. It’s hard work.

One cursory glance on LinkedIn these days and you’d come to the conclusion that it’s exactly the pressure we are most tempted to outsource. Especially if you consider yourself a ‘thought leader’. (Quite how one can be a thought leader and not write one’s own words escapes me).

Now, AI is very good at removing the blank page, giving an idea of a better more hook-them-in structure if you’re having to survive on one of the seven platforms the tech bros have insisted we bend to, in order to pay our mortgages.

AI can summarise, structure, challenge, rephrase, translate, generate options, find patterns and make a half-formed idea look less embarrassing in public.

Used well, it can be a cracking thought partner. But it doesn’t think. You need to do that bit.

The problem with AI is that it doesn’t really have taste. As a human, I do. You might not like my taste, but you can move on and press ‘delete’. It’s still my taste.

Taste is a crucial part of making decisions about what matters. And for that reason, it’s a crucial part of strategy, or choosing what to explore in a lesson, or how you’re going to explore it with the kids.

How do you develop good taste? Well, it’s not by asking an inanimate black box. You develop good taste by reading. Maybe watching some good film. But mostly, you’ve got to read.

At this point in proceedings, our patatas bravas were no more, and we realised that so many professionals we know don’t read, not anywhere enough at least.

If you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to develop your taste.

If you don’t have taste - any taste of any variety - then you can’t really think and discern between a good idea and a great idea, and the downright dangerous idea.

Maybe that’s why the algo is causing such havoc in public life. Because discernment for so many people has gone out the window along with their thinking.

Don’t outsource your thinking if you’re writing about education. Education needs to be the last bastion of thinking, surely? By all means outsource your spelling, your passive voice and your rubbish headlines, so that you hook us in. But writing is thinking, and that’s what we want to read.

Mathematically Stephen and I are due to meet on October 10, 2031. But I hope so very much it’s before then.