American University Sounds the Alarm: Books Will No Longer Be Read.
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Linguist Naomi S. Baron, professor emerita at American University, says students no longer read because they prefer machine-generated summaries. You might think this is nothing new. After all, there were already those little yellow booklets summarizing the classics. No. This is very different. With AI, you don’t just skip pages, you skip the entire cognitive process. You don’t even need to compare two novels or interpret a character. The machine does it. What you’re left with is only the illusion of having read.
The numbers spell disaster. In the United States, kids who read for pleasure dropped from 53% in the 1980s to just 14% today. In the UK, only a third of under-18s pick up a book in their free time. In South Korea, 87% of adults read at least one book in 1994. Today it’s less than half. The trend is global and falling fast.
With services like BooksAI or BookAI.chat, reading is no longer required. Need to prepare a comparison between Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield? Once upon a time you had to read at least a summary. Now AI does the critical comparison for you, and even suggests the questions to bring to class. Personal growth, doubt, discovery. Gone.
Baron calls it “cognitive offloading”: handing over to machines the thinking we should be doing ourselves. Studies already show that writing with AI reduces brain activity and changes the way our brains connect. If the same applies to reading, we’re digging ourselves a cognitive hole.
The issue isn’t just cultural. It’s human. Without truly reading, we lose the ability to interpret, to process, to grow through the stories of others. We let ourselves be seduced by the shortcut of efficiency, but in the end we come out poorer. Not in time, but in thought.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC
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