Are we heading to a post-literate society?

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. For much of human history, mass literacy wasn’t a given. Thanks to the advent of the printing press, more and more people eventually learned how to read and made reading a central practice in their daily lives. This explains why novelists like Charles Dickens attained nearly universal fame. Novels didn’t have to compete with a plethora of other mediums and forms of leisure. While there are literary celebrities today, like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Sally Rooney, reading books is hardly the preeminent cultural pastime. Sure—people still do it. But look around a typical subway car and count how many people are glued to iPhones instead of flipping through a book.

Today, words on a page have been largely replaced by images, sounds, and captions on a screen. A recent New Yorker article called “What’s Happening to Reading” covers this shift in detail. We’ve gone from page to pixel within a relatively short period of time. Joshua Rothman writes,

There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.

I had a friend tell me a few years ago that, as a child, he could curl up in front of the fire at home and read The Lord of the Rings for four or five hours at a time. He would get lost in the text, immersed in the epic adventure, the comradery, the heroism, and reemerge into the real world refreshed and excited. He admitted that he struggled to get close to that kind of reading reverie now. I can relate. Ever since I first held a smartphone in my hand as a young teenager, my ability to sit with a book and read for long periods of time slowly but surely dwindled. Today, screentime is perhaps the biggest issue I face in my daily life; this small device in my hand is a distraction machine, a supercomputer incessantly aimed at my vulnerable human head, and the contraption’s designers want me to spend as much time in front of the shiny screen as possible. My psychology, and your psychology, has been hijacked by Big Tech. Do we stand a chance? Reading certainly is in some kind of trouble.

AI Hits the Scene

Rothman goes on his article to discuss how large language models like ChatGPT have affected our reading lives. Some, like economist Tyler Cowen, embrace AI as a vital editorial assistant and virtual knowledge guide. Rothman notes, however, that AI will also “dumb down” complicated texts so we, the reader, won’t actually have to engage with any original or primary sources. In fact, the primary source will, with this open-armed kind of embrace of AI, quickly become tertiary to the computerized summary.

Back to the Real

AI certainly seems to have its uses when it comes to aggregating key information, summarizing material, or serving as a kind of advanced search engine. It’s convenient to have the AI summary with links to various articles and resources attached. The question remains, though, whether such an approach to information, knowledge, and even works of art and literature is wise, or will benefit the mind in the long run. If the words and images we encounter on the internet become increasingly removed from human artists and authors, does it still hold meaning? Is it real? Or are we inching towards a simulation of a simulation: Computer-generated language and imagery on the malleable, scrollable jungle we call the internet?

Whatever one’s opinion, it’s still a fact that, unlike a human writer or artists, AI can’t think or feel. It can’t experience pain, loss, love, hope, or joy. However cunning the “reading machines” get at simulating language, it will remain a computer. The way some AI companies talk, you might think it’s us, the people, who are the bland machines. We’re the ones who need augmenting and even replacing, making room for the next step of evolution and progress.

However, if you pick up a novel, read some poetry, or enjoy a chat with a friend, that kind of thinking quickly proves illusory. Experience, qualia, the stuff of life, can’t be reduced to a quick summary.