“Human intelligence,” cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is one of nature’s most fragile things. It doesn’t take much to disrupt, suppress, or even destroy it.”
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actress was in the White House, and Postman was concerned about the dominance of images in American media, culture and politics. Television “proposes our minds to understand the world through fragmented images and forces other media to go in that direction,” he argued in his book. Conscientious objections. “Culture does not need to force scholars to flee to make them impotent. Culture does not need to burn books to ensure they are not read. . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
What may have seemed clumsy in 1988 is rather prophetic from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD published the results of a large-scale exercise: personal assessments of the reading, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 16-year-old adults. 65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared to the last assessment a decade ago, the progress in literacy was striking. Competence improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14 countries and significantly weakened in 11 countries. The biggest declines were in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
The literacy of adults with tertiary education (such as university graduates) declined in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while the literacy of adults with less than secondary education declined in almost all countries and economies. Singapore and the United States had the highest inequality in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans are reading at a level you’d expect a 10-year-old to read,” Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, told me, referring to the percentage of Americans who scored. literacy level 1 or below. “It’s actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has trouble reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the deterioration is partly explained by the aging of the population and the increase in immigration, but according to Schleicher, these factors alone do not fully explain the development. His own hypothesis comes as no surprise to Postman: Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex writings like books and newspaper articles to short social media posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that “you read things that reinforce your views rather than different perspectives, and that’s what you need to get to the (top levels) of (OECD Literacy) assessment, where you have to separate fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity , to manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The effects on politics and the quality of public debate are already obvious. These were also foreseen. In 2007, author Caleb Crain wrote an article titled “Twilight of the Books” for The New Yorker about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, clichés and stereotypes are valued, conflict and name-calling are valued because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “only in a literate culture do the inconsistencies of the past have to be considered.” Sound familiar?
These trends are not inevitable or irreversible. Finland shows the potential of high-quality education and strong social norms to maintain a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improving school attendance can make: literacy rates for 16-24-year-olds there were significantly better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI could alleviate or exacerbate the problem is trickier. Systems like ChatGPT can perform a great many reading and writing tasks: they can parse data disputes and condense it into a summary.
Several studies suggest that when used in the workplace, these tools can significantly improve the performance of less skilled workers. In one study, researchers tracked the impact of an artificial intelligence tool on customer service agents who provided technical support through written chat boxes. The AI tool, trained on top talent conversation patterns, provided agents with real-time text suggestions on how to respond to customers. The study found that lower-educated workers became more productive and their communication patterns became similar to those of higher-educated workers.
MIT economics professor David Autor has even argued that AI tools could enable more workers to fill higher-skilled roles and help restore “the middle and middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market.”
But as Autor says, you need a decent foundation to take advantage of the tool to “level up” your skills. Without it, Schleicher worries that people with poor reading skills will become “naive consumers of manufactured content.”
In other words, without a solid skill of your own to support the machine, it is only a few steps to being dependent on it or subject to it.