What do you read and why? A few decades ago, these were not urgent questions. Reading was an unnoticed activity, which has not changed mainly since the emergence of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In 2017, he screams and welcomed entitled “Before the Internet“The writer Emma Raathbon captured the spirit of reading as it was:” Before the Internet, you can wander on a garden seat in Chicago reading some of the debt of the Convoz, and that will be a legitimate thing and no one knows that you have done so unless I told them. “Broker Authority– I did this mainly by moving your eyes through a page, silently, in your own pace and on your own schedule.
Today, the nature of the reading has turned. Many people still enjoy books and traditional patrols, and even there are readers who enabled the network of network of reading and writing; For them, the smartphone is a library in their pocket. However, for others, the old type of ideal reading-intense, extended reading, which begins with carefully made texts-becomes almost a historical paradox. These readers may start a book on an electronic reader and then continue it while moving, by narrating the sound. Or they may completely abandon books, as they spend evening browsing Apple and Substack before drifting in the Reddit Lazy River. There is something widespread and focus on reading now; It includes a lot of random words that flow across the screen, while the lurking presence on YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix and the like guarantees that once we start reading, we must constantly choose not to stop.
This transformation took decades, and was driven by techniques that were adopted inappropriately by young people. Perhaps for these reasons, it has been blocked. In 2023, the National Endowment of Arts I mentioned This, over the previous decade, the percentage of adults who read at least one year decreased annually from fifty -five percent to forty -eight percent. This is an amazing, but modest change compared to what happened among adolescents: The National Center for Education Statistics-which was recently destroyed by the Trump administration-Find This, almost during the same period, the number of children who are thirteen years of age decreased and they have read for fun “almost every day” from twenty -seven percent to fourteen percent. As expected, university professors were complaint With more than usual urgency about students adding to the phone who struggle to read anything with a great length or complexity.
Some evidence of low reading and writing. Discuss one on a large scale TicketFor example, the student rulers have their ability to analyze the muddy and the semantic opening of the state of “dark house”; This is somewhat similar to the evaluation of swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of sugar molasses. There are other reasons to be multiple around the slide away from books, given what many of us actually love to read. If we organize “strange things” instead of reading Stephen King, or listened to podcast for self -assistance instead of buying self -assistance books, is this the end of civilization? At a level, the decreases in traditional reading are associated with information disorder in the digital age. Do we really want to return to a time when there was less reading, watching, hearing and learning?
However, all we think about these changes, it seems likely to accelerate. Over the past few decades, many scientists have seen a decrease in reading as a closure.Gothenburg brackets–A period of date, which was opened with the invention of the printing press, during which an organized ecosystem for printing.
In the past, though, there is almost strange thing about the hypothesis of oral culture. We may say that it was largely developed during the brackets of Zuckerberg – a period of history, opened with a Facebook invention, which ruled social media. No person inside these arches imagined the how much the threat will be determined by artificial intelligence soon on the internet conversation. We have already entered into a world in which the people you face online are sometimes Not actually people; Instead, they are Evoke Using artificial intelligence that has been trained on huge amounts of unimaginable. It seems as if the books have reached life, and they take revenge by creating something new – marriage from the text, thought and conversation that will review the benefit and value of the written word.
In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Quinn Declare He started “writing for AIS”. Now I suggest that we assume that all that he published is “reading” not only by people but also by artificial intelligence systems – and he has reached this second type of readers as important. “With very few exceptions, even famous thinkers and writers in their lives have eventually forgotten,” Queen noted. But AIS may not forget; In fact, if you provide them with enough of your text, they may extract from it a “model of how you think”, where future readers can interact. Quinn wrote: “Your grandchildren, or perhaps future fans, will not have to search for many ancient books to obtain the ink of your thoughts.” At this time, it is Start Publishing on his blog about the most noticeable periods of his life – for example, for example. Human readers may not care about such publications, but the entries can make it possible for “for the advanced AIS in the near future to write the biography of Tyer Cowen very good.”
Quinn can think about this way because large language models, such as ChatGPT from Openai or Claud, among other things, read machines. It is not quite right to say that they “read” in the human sense: LLM cannot move with what he reads, because he has no emotions, and its heart cannot race to suspense. But it cannot be denied that there are aspects of reading in which AIS excels on a super -level. During its training, LLM will read “and” understand “a large amount of texts. Later, it will be possible to remember the material of this text immediately (if not always perfectly), drawing communications, making comparisons, and extracting visions, which you can bear on a new text, which has not been trained on it, at a terrible speed. The systems are like university graduates who, while they were at school, did literally everyone Reading. They can read more, if you give them tasks.
I knew some of the people who seemed to have read everything, and learning from them was changing life. It cannot be replaced by the artificial intelligence of these individuals because it is general in general and a consensus. You will not look to Chatgpt as a role model for the life of the mind, or suspense to the theories of great Gemini or the visions of privacy. But Amnesty International has the strengths of readers that are precisely in its personality. In the David Pearl Podcast “How to Write”, Queen explains that, as he reads, he is free of chatting with questions about everything he does not understand; Never repeat artificial intelligence such questions, and in answering them, depends on a set of knowledge that no person can reach quickly. This transforms any text into a type of starting point or approach. But artificial intelligence can also simplify: If you are struggling with the opening of “Bleak House”, you can request rewrite it using the English language easier and more modern. Dickens wrote: “The gas that is waving on the horizon in the fog in the divers in the streets, just as it may look at the sun, from the sponge fields, as it is waving on the horizon by the husband and Ploughboy.” Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps faintly glow in fog in different locations throughout the streets, such as how the sun appears for farmers working in foggy fields.”
In this way, armed readers of Amnesty International may find themselves unclear between primary and secondary sources – especially if they read the materials that they believe can be separated from the content. Many people are already comfortable to do this: Since 2012, Berlin -based Blinkist has presided over its headquarters, which heads itself as a “future of reading”, for fifteen minutes’ summaries of the famous non -fictional books, coordinating the text and sound. (In “Walsh” a quarter of an hour lasts, you may be able to control Ryan Holiday of Stoic and Buddhist philosophy, “Smile is the key. ) Or looking Digestion Intensive books, partnerships based on the subscription, which were published, on a seasonal basis, handsome cover units containing four or five novels that were cut into approximately half of their original size. Books were common – in 1987, Times I mentioned This is one and a half million readers bought ten million volumes annually – and when I was older, my parents kept their rift in our house; Without really thinking about it, I read some “intense” excitement by Francis and Nora Roberts. (The series is still presented today, such as Digestion Fantasy Favorite.) If you are writing an academic paper on the novel “Whip Hand”, from 1979, I will face a big problem in relying on the intensive version. But if what I am is the story, vitality, and suspense, I may be justified in feeling that I “read” the book. Certainly, I am unlikely to seek to search for an unwanted version.
In our current reading system, the summary or changed texts are the exception, not the rule. But over the next decade or so, this polarity may be well reflected: we may start routinely with alternative texts, and then we later decide to search for the original copies, almost in the same way that we are now downloading samples from new books to us before our commitment to them. Since artificial intelligence can generate shortcuts, summaries and other intensive versions on request, we may even switch between versions as conditions dictate – the way you may decide today to listen to the “2x” podcast, or leave a boring TV program and turn into Wikipedia to see how it ended. Pop songs often come in different modifications – clean editing, and various edm replace processes. As a writer, I may not want to see the broken text in this way. But the power of refraction will not be for me to control; It will lie with readers and AIS together, and the distance between reading and editing will collapse.
It is reasonable to say that some types of writing should not, or may not be summarized. If you read a summary of Elena Ferrante’s Napoli novels– I did this, Lino did so – you are cheating yourself. Maybe Douglas R. Hofstadter “Godll, Esh, Bach: eternal gold braid“It can be boiled to its main concepts, and Chatbot may explain to you more clearly than Hofstadter – but the length and difficulty are part of this book. Readers will surely continue to estimate the original sounds of their human colleagues. Recently, I have been reading Tolstoy’s.”Childhood, childhood, youth“It is full of German phrases, historical details and Russian cultural differences that I do not understand.
