Why We Might Be The Last Generation That Reads

0:00We may be the last generation that reads. When you look at the data around literacy, how many people read just leisurely, what's happening in schools and education, the data shows we're moving towards a post-literate society. I don't say that lightly. I don't say that in an alarmist way. It's what the data shows. Now, I talk a lot about the future of work and the future of life, right, with all of these complex AI systems and everything else that's coming in the pipeline from space to synthetic biology. The more complex a society becomes, the more skills like deep thinking, complex reasoning, long-term thinking become central to its functioning.

0:36Most of those skills can be cultivated through reading, even skills like imagination. So today I'm going to talk about what the data shows on reading where we are, where it could be going, and why I think we need to do everything in our power to retain reading as a core aspect of learning in our society. I'm Sinead Bovell and this is I've Got Questions. I want to start by why reading is so important to the brain. And it's not the only way to build some of these skills, but it's a tried and true way and one that we've studied. Reading is very unnatural for humans. We did not evolve with a brain that was ready to read.

1:16We evolved with a brain that could do visual interpretation. So I can try to interpret the expressions on your face so I know, are you a threat? Are you an ally? Is that a rock? Is that a wolf? We evolved with that type of an architecture in the brain. Reading forces the brain to rewire itself because now you have to start recognizing these strange symbols, these abstract symbols, and assign meaning to them, aka words. So when you are reading, you are inherently inserting that cognitive friction right out of the gate. But reading also forces the brain to hold on to an idea if you're reading a longer form book, even if you're reading a few chapters.

1:53You have to retain that idea, right? What is that through line? What is the storyline? It forces you to start to construct an argument in your mind. And you probably are familiar with this when you're reading a book and you start to either get lost in it over time. So you start to put these imaginary faces to the characters. You maybe have your own take on how the story is developing, where it may go. That's the brain working to reconstruct a narrative of where it thinks it's going. All of that is so good for the brain. And, of course, reading isn't the only way to build those skills. And I think it's important to share that.

2:25People learn in different ways, right? But reading is one way that's been studied, and we've seen all of the results and neuroplasticity of what reading does to the brain. So I want to read some of the statistics about where reading is today. And we can't just look at society and say we stopped reading. It's complex. It's interconnected with different reasons towards why we've started to move off of the reading cliff. It starts way back in the 70s when education moved away from assigning a lot of long-form reading and towards more short passageways, short excerpts. And I remember that from school.

3:00I think I only had to read two books in my whole high school, maybe three. And this was because it's easier to mark, right? If you have 30 kids, you're signing them a long-form book to read. That's really hard to keep track of, especially at younger ages. So we all moved to these shorter books, these shorter passageways, and these shorter excerpts. So that happened as a structural decision society-wide. The stats I'm going to read pertain to the U.S., but I think we can just extrapolate them to different regions for now. So from 1982, 2002, there's a collective decline in adult literacy rates.

3:31And I'm going to pull some from an amazing article in The Atlantic about the end of reading that evaluated a bunch of different studies and where the data shows we are today. I'm going to quote, Looking across these reports, there appeared to have been declines in book reading. In 1992, 61 % of adults reported reading a book for pleasure over the last 12 months. this dropped to 49 % by 2022. Monitoring the future survey with the proportion who read a book or a magazine every day, so something more casual, that went from 60 % in the 1970s to 16 % by 2016. By 2022, around 48 % of American adults have read any book in the previous year.

4:15That's down from about 55 % in 2012. So it's the trend lines, right, that we have to be plotting here. So that means less than half of the population of American adults read a book at all in the previous year. Daily leisure reading fell from 28 % in 2004 to 16 % in 2023. And this also connects to literacy rates, right? It's not just that people have filled in with other hobbies. Over one quarter of American adults score at a level one or below when it comes to literacy, meaning they struggle with longer texts and drawing inferences. And when you read more into the data, you can see certain inflection points around digital technology.

4:56So then digital technologies step into our world, and they really send us into a different direction, right? Now our time can be occupied, and we're still getting information, right? It's just coming in a different form. And this is why we're starting to hear that term moving towards a post-literate society. We're still gaining access to information. It's just coming not in text. It's coming in video formats. It's coming in short summaries. It's coming in clips, feeds, AI-generated explanations. So this is the rise of what could be a post-literate society that is learning in some ways and gaining information, but not through reading.

5:36And I talked about this in a clip on social media recently that I shared that has gained some traction in the world. Everything about our modern digital environment and just how the modern world is being built around us is pulling us away from having to do anything that requires cognitive friction, that requires patience, that requires discovery, that requires inference. Videos come in 60 to 90 second formats. The key takeaway has been arranged for you. Your newsfeed curates a worldview. And now with the rise of artificial intelligence, not only do you not have to search or try to discover information, but it can, if you let it, give you the judgment call too.

6:20It can tell you this is what that means for you. And here's what you should probably do next. Not only can it give you the judgment, it can also do some of these incredible things. Like it can turn a piece of written content into a podcast, a feature that I do utilize, or it can turn something into an audio overview or into a short form video. This is an incredible step in AI. I think it's very helpful and it can be an additive tool. But we have to use it intentionally because if we're just using it in abundance and we're not actually putting that cognitive friction back into our world, and this is particularly important for kids.

6:53if we're not raising the bar on where cognitive friction comes back into our lives, then we are offloading. So figuring out what that balance is, I was at a dinner party, this is actually a few months ago now, and a parent was telling me that their child just wants to put everything into a short-form video using AI or into an audio summary using AI. That's really cool with some things. Where it can be used best is if something is at an intellectual level that's above the child's learning level. So maybe it's a high school science paper and the kid is only 9 or 10. That's a good use of turning something very complex into something that's simpler for the child.

7:30But if you're only ever turning it into that format, where else is cognitive friction coming into somebody's life? And again, everybody has different ways of learning. And there are different accessibility needs and different ways of accessing material. So that's separate. It's about being honest with yourself or your child about where you're actually learning and engaging those neurons. And as a futurist, of course, I have to take us to what else is in the pipeline. And I promise I'm going to turn us the other way in a second. But if you look at what smartphone providers and some of the companies that are stepping into the game to try to disrupt them are building, it's screen-free devices for the AI age.

8:09And that sounds like it's some kind of noble cause that get our screens out. It's because a screen-free environment may actually be more optimal to AI, right? So AI needs to see what you see and hear what you hear. And then it's supposed to be able to, you know, this all-knowing AI that some of the companies are building, then it's able to interpret the world around you and direct you as you go through your life. So instead of me needing to search a bunch of things on Amazon and make that order, if I have my Apple AirPods with cameras, which is what they're coming up to market with, I can just tell my AI assistant this is what I need and it can go do that.

8:41or Meta has glasses or Google's coming up with glasses or OpenAI is bringing a device to market. And yes, of course, glasses, there's a little screen, but I don't imagine people are going to do long form reading on AI glasses. I'm not saying any of these devices are going to win. Maybe none of them. Maybe we all just leave devices entirely. Of course, those are all possible, but we do have to pay attention to the signals and what they are telling us so we can make better decisions in the present. When we paint that picture, the idea of having even access to text starts to get further and further away, which means we're going to have to push ourselves up this cognitive ladder to start to retain agency over these faculties and over these processes.

9:24I want to say that we have been here before in some ways. A few months ago, I wrote a substat called The Great Cognitive Divide. And in it, I wrote about how Socrates through Plato started to panic that with the rise of written texts starting to replace oral tradition, we'd have the society that appeared wise because they've read everything, but they don't actually know anything. They've parroted somebody else's thoughts and retained them as their own. When the printing press arrived in Europe in the 15th century, fears intensified, right? This technology is going to drown the world in these shallow ideas.

10:02Renaissance moralists worried that too many books would produce these superficial thinkers, people who skimmed everything and measured nothing. Does this sound familiar? And they weren't entirely wrong, right? Rope memorization, it did wither. But the loss made room for something else. The printing press rewired how human knowledge moved, right? Ideas that sat locked away in monasteries or in royal courts, they spilled into coffee houses, into lecture halls. And reading and writing, it stopped being the solitary act that was only available to the few, and it became a shared network. Knowledge, for the first time in human history was cumulative.

10:40It got more complex. And you know what we did as a society as a result to make sense of the complexity, to try to parse what is fake from what is real, what is helpful from what is not? We built institutions around it. We built new methods, the scientific method. Journalism. All of this was born as a result of new challenges and new complexity. We raised the bar on what it meant to be a thinking individual in society. Now reading became a part of that. Writing became a part of that. And knowledge was more complex because it was more dense because it could build on itself over time. We're at another one of those moments.

11:18The devices and all of that aside, with a technology like artificial intelligence, yes, we could move to a world where we offload more thinking to it, but we don't have to. So if we adapt education properly, and artificial intelligence is leveraged really strategically to strengthen thinking. And that means that it doesn't have to come into every assignment. It doesn't even have to come into classrooms. But we understand what are the key skills that we need to work with this technology, complex thinking, reasoning, critical thinking. If we really focus on building those skills, we inherently become better users of this technology and it forces us to not want to offload so much to it.

11:56if we in our individual lives are honest with ourself about what builds cognitive friction for each of us as individuals. For me, that is reading. I do love audiobooks. And of course, they're fun. And for some people, that is their preferred method of learning. So that's okay. But for me, reading is where I build cognitive friction. So I force myself to do it. If we take those little actions each and every day in our own lives, we start to resist this direction of moving towards this cognitive offloading and letting the thinking happen for us in our environments. Of course, the bigger change needs to be structural, right?

12:33It's to how these technologies are designed. It's to how education is designed, right? It's how we prioritize things also as a society. That's going to take longer. But what we can do as individuals, we have control over that each and every day. And my fear is that if we don't do this, we could see a cognitive of divide where you might see a group of people, and usually it tends to be people that are more economically privileged that have the time, the bandwidth, and the resources to take time off and just get lost in a book or have a tutor for the child that enforces reading. But we see this kind of divide where people who continue to exercise their cognitive faculties, resist the urge to offload to the environment, insert cognitive friction into their world, start to break away and have more advantages in these cognitive divides, historically, they can turn into economic divides.

13:22So I think we need to do everything in our power to resist that. Here's what I do in my own life. So one, I make reading a core part of every day to make it fun for me, because sometimes, again, reading is a source of cognitive friction for me. It's easier to not read. I have a few books going at once. And so it depends on what I feel like can join that day or that evening. I read out loud. And so I'm also trying to exercise my communication skills and making sure that my orality is strong, which is something that's going to be central to the future of work. When I do use AI, and of course I use it when we talk about it, I talk about it all the time.

14:00I try to use it as a sparring partner. So point out the holes in my thinking, right? What arguments have I missed here? When AI gives me an answer, I don't just accept it. I evaluate it. I critique it. I point out the gaps in it. It's not a fact finding machine, right? These are reasoning machines. These are prediction machines. They're not fact finding machines. I think about when I even need to insert AI in the process at all. Not all problems are meant to be solved by AI. And I've really taken back long form journalism into my life. I spend now an hour sometimes reading those long articles from the Atlantic or The New Yorker.

14:38And of course, like everybody, I enjoy audiobooks and I enjoy AI summaries sometimes when I don't have time to go through it or it's not something that's critical to my world. It's a balance, right? So it's about being honest about what works for you and what exerts cognitive friction in your own world. My hope is that we hear from academia more frequently on this topic, that we hear from our policymakers more frequently on this topic. We hear a lot about AI, national security, GDP, productivity. But do you know what is central to all of that and central to a thriving economy? People with a strong well-being, people who can think over the long term, people with deep judgment skills, critical thinking skills, all of that becomes central to it.

15:17It's not a feature, right? It's foundational. So the key takeaway from today, the message from today is to add cognitive friction into your life, to insert it, to retain it, whatever that means for you and your learning style. Don't run from it. The environment around us makes this an uphill battle and more of a choice, but I think it's one that's really important to make. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll see you next time.