People think I'm kidding when I say there is a fascist agenda behind the promotion of AI. These devices are designed to kill literacy. We grew up in one of those rare periods of history where most people could read, and those who can read are harder to control.
Ezra Klein: "I think I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in "The Matrix" where it's like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into.
I thought that reading was about downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you're doing is spending time grappling with the text. Making connections. That'll only happen through that process of grappling.
Part of what's happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on a single topic. The idea that o3 can summarize it for you is nonsense. ChatGPT outputs don't impress themselves upon you. They don't change you."
Ezra Klein: Part of what's happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on a given topic. But the idea that ChatGPT can summarize it for you is nonsense.
The point is that books don't just give you information. They give you a container to think about a narrowly defined scope of ideas.
Downloading information is obviously part of why you read books. But the other part is that books let you ruminate on a topic with a level of depth that's hard to achieve on your own.
@ezraklein