The Atlantic's "Age of Reading is Over"

I am a self described reader. It's a key part of how I self identify. For years--a lot of them--I subscribed to three magazines a month: The Walrus, Harper's and The Atlantic. Depression monthly someone once called it, but it was good reading and informative.

So, when The Atlantic published Rose Horowitch's The Age of Reading is Over it's maybe a bit surprising that I didn't get to it. Like a lot of people, print media has faded from my routine, replaced instead by clicking on links to headlines and first paragraphs before encountering a paywall barrier. The library has fantastic access to magazines for free, but I don't love reading on my iPad (thought I'm typing on it now.) None of the apps I use to read magazines lets me print an article, which would be the ideal. eInk screens are pretty good for reading, but I can't find a way to get a monthly magazine onto the Kindle that I use with a slight sense of disdain.

So, I finally got around to reading and it's probably one of the most important articles I've read in a long time.

The book is a very old thing at this point, though not as old as some technologies. I think it's not a coincidence that it has stubbornly refused to be pushed aside in a way that newer tools have not.

Music fell quickly: the first recordings of music emerged in the late 19th century. The late 20th century saw the introduction of Compact Disc, its content digitally encoded, perfectly reproduceable and unencrypted. That last part meant it wasn't even hard to move to a computer. By the mid 2010's physical music was mostly dead. Some of us cling to vinyl and CDs but that's more of a fetish than anything else. A niche hobby. Physical recorded music basically had a life span of about 150 years.

Television and movies took longer, but had a shorter life. Invented in the early 20th century it didn't become common until the 1960s. My mother had to go to the neighbour's house to watch the moon landing on July 20, 1967. Ubiquity happened quickly, but increasingly people are cutting cords and skipping movie theatres. It took a while for home bandwidth to catch up, but by now anybody who wants to can stream video into their house. Let's say it had a life of about 80 years. (Video rentals were even shorter lived--when I was born, there was no such business. Blockbuster was then one of the largest companies in the world and now? Blockbuster is gone.)

The Gutenberg Press was invented in the 1400's so by comparison the mass printed word has had a good long run--600 years. The printed word brough us democracy, (relative) equality and universal knowledge. There's not much bad you can say about it--yes it's been used to spread lies and propoganda, but the good outweighs the bad in a big way.

It also feels like we've been talking about the decline of reading for a long time. Screens secude us into their depth. So, why this article at this time?

The answer, as it so often does these days, involves generative AI because it's not the death of reading only: it's the death of writing.

I work in technology and I'm not anti-AI (except inasmuch as calling it artificial intelligence is a false and mislead label) but I am a realist. I don't use it much at all and I can always tell the people who do.

Writing, Horowitch points out, forces us to think. When you want to convey an idea you process the information so that it's most convincing. You revise sentences to make them more concise and precise. You make decisions about what ideas are important and need to be included and what aren't. This process exercises your mind even more than reading does.

When you give your AI engine a prompt, you do none of this. More often than not at best you might quickly review the output, but even that's doubtful based on stories of professors receiving essays with glaringly obvious errors. At one job I worked with a sales team that used to take RFP's, put them into ChatGPT and use the result as a response. They were unreadble but they were sent out to clients. Elon Musk's Grok has been famously racist and mysoginist, but hundreds of millions still use it and its highly skewed output.

On the other side of the problem, the persistent use of summaries and excerpts poses a problem--those headlines and first paragraphs included. Horowitch explains:

...a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America's most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text.

So the problem now is the double ended assault on thinking really (I was going to say intelligence which seems both accurate but maybe too soon to judge.) Horowitch quotes the well known media theorist Neil Postman

"The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining," Postman wrote.

All of this is readily apparent in the world today: politicians focus on 30...no 20...no 10 second soundbites. Serious issues aren't discussed and the current leadership of the United States talks about war in words that belong in Call of Duty. As we go about our daily lives, are we not entertained?

Some of us aren't. I'm staying away from generative AI because I want to keep my (aging, to be sure) brain healthy and alert. As I interact with people more and more who are using it, I can see the rot happening. Ideas don't get discussed, documents are presented but not understood and facts are fleeting, falling in the face of ChatGPT responses. I'd rather do the hard work, and do it well.

Maybe it is intelligence after all, in which case the article deserves a better title: The Age of Intelligence is Over. I wonder if anybody would read that?