Throughout history and across cultures, "reading" and "writing" were long the exclusive privileges of the ruling class. Breaking this monopoly required a great deal of time and effort. As Korea's creation and use of Hangul demonstrates, the struggle to universalize reading in particular was fierce — and, fortunately, victorious. As reading, a central pillar of human cognitive ability, became available to all, humanity achieved the modernization of democratized knowledge and social equality.
But within a single generation, cracks are forming in humanity's original act of "reading." This is because artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated deeply into daily life. Before we knew it, an "AI era" arrived, and a world in which we entrust the reading of materials to AI — and even leave writing to AI — has become reality.
Naomi Baron, a linguist who has spent 30 years researching how technology intervenes in the ways we read, write, and think, argues in her new book "The People Who Don't Read" that the reading AI that has quietly infiltrated our daily lives — the "Reader Bot" — is replacing human reading. "The more we hand reading over to AI, the more empty human life will become," she points out.
The author asks: While AI reads, what do humans do, or what do they fail to do? In a world overflowing with information and stimulation, some celebrate the time they save by leaving reading to AI, hoping to become ever more enthusiastic "cognitive misers." A cognitive miser refers to the human instinct to conserve mental effort as much as possible.
The problem is that reading ability is not something that, once acquired, remains forever; it is an ability that disappears if not used. Naturally, it does not develop in the first place if not learned. When we rely on the quickest shortcuts and plausible summaries that AI offers, instead of reading deeply and weighing meaning each time, the cognitive muscle for independent thinking quietly weakens. In the end, even while encountering a great deal of superficial information, we lose the very ability to read and interpret it within context — that is, the power to discern what is important and what is missing. This is precisely where cognitive poverty begins. The author warns that we are therefore facing an era in which human intelligence risks regressing for the first time since the emergence of Homo sapiens — the so-called "Textpocalypse."
In fact, an age of intelligence regression is becoming reality. According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and estimated adult literacy data, half of American adults today fall short even of the literacy level required of a middle school student, and among them, the functionally illiterate population — those who struggle even with third-grade reading and writing — reaches 43 million.
Meanwhile, a trend of using AI in talent selection processes is also being observed. As of 2024, 82% of U.S. college admissions offices said they planned to use AI in their admissions screening. A strange spectacle has become reality, in which one AI reads and evaluates a personal statement that another AI wrote on the applicant's behalf. Who, then, can judge that this selection process is fair?
There is even a warning that if AI-generated text suffocates human writing, and people no longer even distinguish between machine and human writing, society could become "an information-unequal society in which the few who control technology control the mind." This is why we must read and think for ourselves, even while enduring the inconvenience. Priced at 22,000 won.
