Fascinating and challenging—a great combination. NPR recently talked about how much our shortened attention spans keeps us from getting deeply engaged with thoughts and emotions. Reading books requires sustained attention. Reading something longer than you can’t read in one sitting requires memory and synthesis and the amount of material requiring this work increases with each page. These integrative skills are crucial human tools we now consider too difficult for the average person to have, but they used to be considered essential for any adult. We don’t even cultivate those skills in college students.
As Bloom said in his interview, reading is how we can enrich our minds by packing the thinking and experience of as many superior minds as possible into what seems too short a lifetime.
Thank you, K! I agree very much about the crucial importance of memory, synthesis, and deep emotional engagement while reading--but you're right that these skills have effectively been abandoned, even by humanities professors, many of whom are no longer assigning lengthy books like Middlemarch, Bleak House, or Moby-Dick, which were once staples of the curriculum. Accustomed to flipping through text messages and short-form videos, students today are struggling to read even short literary texts — and the quality of engagement and understanding just isn't there. This is one of the most profound shifts in human cognition in all of history.
A very thought-provoking piece, Maurice! As I’ve played around with the “advantages” of AI I’ve come away feeling a bit empty and disconnected. Imagine that experience translating over a whole population of users. COVID got humans in the habit of living with distance. Now AI continues the intentional or unintentional drive toward separation and the mechanization of our relationships. Sometimes I wish we could put this horse back in the barn, but it seems to have escaped any ability to at least corral it into a much-smaller space!
Two quotes came to mind, inspired by your post, Maurice.
“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.” —Roland Barthes
Which obviously does not apply to AI, since writing for AI presents no problem greater than energy requirements.
And, “Poets teach just to use words with special force. We may need their help in finding new ways to talk about brains.” —J.Z. Young
This corresponds with the notion that poetry is more than wonderful words strung together in syntactically significant ways, but a multi-modal window into the human soul.
The more we offload to AI the more we're going to rely on human indicators like reading and writing challenges to separate ourselves from the AI weakened population. I've never bought into the death of the author theory but this post makes it clear that in a post-AI world, the only true author has to be alive (in the work) and identifiably human, or its value plummets.
Thank you, Jeremiah! I completely agree with what you say. Just as we still appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty of handmade items in an age of mass production, it's possible that texts written by humans will one day carry the same prestige value. Regardless, it's clear that people have difficulty relating emotionally to material they know to have been churned out by AI—which soon will include much of the Internet.
Fascinating and challenging—a great combination. NPR recently talked about how much our shortened attention spans keeps us from getting deeply engaged with thoughts and emotions. Reading books requires sustained attention. Reading something longer than you can’t read in one sitting requires memory and synthesis and the amount of material requiring this work increases with each page. These integrative skills are crucial human tools we now consider too difficult for the average person to have, but they used to be considered essential for any adult. We don’t even cultivate those skills in college students.
As Bloom said in his interview, reading is how we can enrich our minds by packing the thinking and experience of as many superior minds as possible into what seems too short a lifetime.
Thank you, K! I agree very much about the crucial importance of memory, synthesis, and deep emotional engagement while reading--but you're right that these skills have effectively been abandoned, even by humanities professors, many of whom are no longer assigning lengthy books like Middlemarch, Bleak House, or Moby-Dick, which were once staples of the curriculum. Accustomed to flipping through text messages and short-form videos, students today are struggling to read even short literary texts — and the quality of engagement and understanding just isn't there. This is one of the most profound shifts in human cognition in all of history.
Well said. On a side note, I am a proud reader of both the unabridged version of Les Miserable and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby 🙂
A very thought-provoking piece, Maurice! As I’ve played around with the “advantages” of AI I’ve come away feeling a bit empty and disconnected. Imagine that experience translating over a whole population of users. COVID got humans in the habit of living with distance. Now AI continues the intentional or unintentional drive toward separation and the mechanization of our relationships. Sometimes I wish we could put this horse back in the barn, but it seems to have escaped any ability to at least corral it into a much-smaller space!
Two quotes came to mind, inspired by your post, Maurice.
“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.” —Roland Barthes
Which obviously does not apply to AI, since writing for AI presents no problem greater than energy requirements.
And, “Poets teach just to use words with special force. We may need their help in finding new ways to talk about brains.” —J.Z. Young
This corresponds with the notion that poetry is more than wonderful words strung together in syntactically significant ways, but a multi-modal window into the human soul.
The more we offload to AI the more we're going to rely on human indicators like reading and writing challenges to separate ourselves from the AI weakened population. I've never bought into the death of the author theory but this post makes it clear that in a post-AI world, the only true author has to be alive (in the work) and identifiably human, or its value plummets.
Thank you, Jeremiah! I completely agree with what you say. Just as we still appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty of handmade items in an age of mass production, it's possible that texts written by humans will one day carry the same prestige value. Regardless, it's clear that people have difficulty relating emotionally to material they know to have been churned out by AI—which soon will include much of the Internet.