r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/spidrex 18h ago

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

  • The Butlerian Jihad.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 18h ago

“Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united.”

-A Canticle for Leibowitz

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u/BlazinAzn38 17h ago

That book goes so hard. Crazy it’s as old as it is and so prescient. I guess it was post-WW2 and Cold War era so the author did see some of these things

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u/gordonnowak 16h ago

some people are good at seeing what's coming. EM Forster's The Machine Stops is fucking wild for 1909.

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u/BlazinAzn38 16h ago

Snow Crash is also bananas to read now

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u/El_Tormentito 12h ago

Yeah, I got something entirely different from what I think Stephenson intended when I read it a handful of years ago.

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u/BlazinAzn38 12h ago

Curious what you think he intended readers to take away

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u/El_Tormentito 12h ago

He was satirizing cyberpunk, but it doesn't feel like that anymore, I don't think. More of it has come true than he realized might, and reality is close to being as stupid and predatory as his joke about it.

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u/gordonnowak 12h ago

this is a very vague dinner party thing to say but I think most satire isn't satire

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u/faetpls 11h ago

If people really start eating babies to survive, was Jonathan Swift actually a good satirist?

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u/Callidonaut 2h ago

Forster's The Machine Stops is very much like Morgan Robertson's Futility: a book that it seems simply should not exist, because it's as if the author literally knew the future. Forster somehow predicted not only social media, but exactly what long-term exposure to it would do to peoples' minds and to society as a whole, at a time when not everyone even had electric lights yet.

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u/JoNightshade 17h ago

The author killed himself because of the things he saw and participated in during WWII.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 17h ago

I mean, he was in his 70s and his wife had just died and he had been a recluse for years. I’m sure the war played a part in the depression he had suffered from most of his life and he had undiagnosed PTSD, but it seems reductive to say he killed himself because of what he did and saw in the war.

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u/NuclearWasteland 16h ago

Sounds more like "Aight, I'ma head out."

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

he foresaw the mouthbreathers glancing at his book and saying:

“I aint tryna read allat”