Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have “lost the ability to read at length and in depth…”
No wonder the reading scores of American high-school students are the worst since 1992, according to a new report. No wonder the next generation communicates in memes, not words, let alone sentences. AI is surely compounding this even further, allowing you to have an increasingly sophisticated bot read something for you. College itself, as a period when you devote yourself to long and deep solitary reading, is becoming obsolete:
Large language models have created an existential crisis for teachers trying to evaluate their students’ ability to actually write, as opposed to their ability to prompt an LLM to do all their homework.
‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ one student said. ‘Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,’
a professor echoed.”