Post by Carlos S. G.

AI took our cover Rose Horowitch argues in The Atlantic that reading is dying, but the bigger loss lies in how we understand structured ideas built across the writing process. The problem of the death of reading is what comes before it, and it is writing, and writing meant holding one argument across many pages, structuring it and sustaining it all the way through. Which is why Cal Newport argues that the structuring is where the thinking actually gets built, so the moment you hand the writing away you keep the opinions and lose the reasoning that used to produce them. For most of human history books did not exist, mass literacy is only a few centuries old and Rose's own point is that reading was never our natural state but a brief interlude between the oral age and the digital one we are now sliding back into. Reading never actually made a society think, it only made thinking look widespread, since the reasoning always sat with the small minority who wrote and argued while most of us borrowed the conclusions and called the borrowing knowledge. Twenty percent of adults already read eighty percent of the books, so the concentration the essay treats as a coming crisis is how it has always worked. Now everyone can publish, have an opinion on anything and try to sound intelligent while borrowing, stealing, and co-creating texts, myself included, right now, in a few hundred words. So what AI takes from us is the cover because once the borrowing is automated nothing is left to hide the fact that the reasoning was always done by a few and rented by the rest of us and that is a heavier thing to face than the death of the book. If a machine can produce your argument, did you ever really have one? Rose Horowitch, "The End of Reading Is Here," The Atlantic: https://lnkd.in/eeTm-J6P