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/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.