"We still use horses" is also true, but no one would say that America has a thriving horse economy. Paper isn't any different.

I used to be part of several student housing cooperative systems. They were artfully designed and inspired by B.F. Skinner's utopian novel Walden Two. They utilized labor-sharing systems that worked for decades. By the time of the late 2000s, they were all failing along the same faultlines and required intervention from a national organization, the North American Students of Cooperaton (NASCO), to keep them financially and systemically afloat, which is not the same as functional.

When these organizations were still functional, they kept meticulous paper archives. Meeting minutes, policy updates, instructional information, etc. When they stopped being functional, these archives just gathered dust in the corner of the local organization's office, next to the computers.

You see, the entire process of having in-person meetings, capturing good shorthand notes, then typing up formal minutes from those notes, then creating copies for distribution and archives take significant time. And there's accountability on the receiving end. So documents must meet a certain bar of decorum and effort.

When the desktop computers showed up, those norms began to slip. It's not a hard sell. It's much easier to just have a place where you can type up, edit, and print documents, all in one place, without wasting paper. But wait! It's even more environmentally friendly to not print the files. People can just access them on the computer, if they want to (hint: they actually don't). But meeting notes were still at least done by hand then turned into digital documents.

Then the laptops showed up, and instead of people taking paper notes to then transform into digital documents, they just became shorthand txt and doc files that never got turned into actual formatted documents. And having a laptop capable of being on the Internet means that the person in charge of minutes is never fully on task. Who wouldn't be?

And so by the late 2000s and early 2010s, the entire paper-based ecology began to disappear entirely. And so went the legibility and effort along with it. Sure, major things continued to be printed, but nothing else was.

So yes, they still use paper, but they don't rely upon it. That's the difference. AI is doing the same thing to human brains. Yes, people will still use them, but they won't rely upon them which is a different proposition entirely.

We still use paper