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What Happens If No One Reads: With AI able to quickly summarize everything from self-help books to great novels, we need to remind ourselves why we read in the first place.
With AI able to quickly summarize everything from self-help books to great novels, we need to remind ourselves why we read in the first place, writes Spencer Klavan.
In the fourth century BCE—shortly after it became trendy for the chic philosophers of Athens to sell and distribute written copies of their lectures to the elite young strivers of their day—Plato wrote a dialogue, Phaedrus, in which Socrates grouses that gadgets like papyrus are making students lazy. He even dreams up a myth in which one of the gods frets that humans will rely on writing to augment their powers of recollection, and that “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their own memory.” You can almost picture the Library of Alexandria as the ancient version of a cloud server bank somewhere out by Palo Alto, housing the sum total of recorded knowledge so that humanity doesn’t have to trouble itself with remembering.
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