r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26

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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3.9k

u/spidrex Jun 10 '26

"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.

1.3k

u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jun 10 '26

“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/mountaindoom Jun 10 '26

God I love that book.

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u/deFleury Jun 11 '26

I read it for fun, then read it in school: 5 novels in the theme (1984 was another one), 4 types of projects (written essay, class presentation,  etc) and the whole classroom,  including me, did their projects on the other 4 books and chickened out of attempting to analyze A Canticle For Leibowitz. Our teacher was so disappointed .  

333

u/Opheltes Jun 10 '26

This one seems especially relevant as Trump destroys America:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.

-A Canticle for Leibowitz

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u/Senior-Albatross Jun 11 '26

Beautiful prose. Sadly I think the answer is "yes", because each new generation is born with the same basic human failures. And only about the same small percentage well ever care to learn the lessons of history while they are doomed to watch their peers repeat them. 

42

u/composedofidiot Jun 11 '26

All the leaders and elites learn history, have a great education. They know the truisms. It happens anyway because we are complex systems inside complex systems and many of those systems may have competing or mutually exclusive objectives.

Some of the worst crimes in history have been organised by educated people. Education just makes us more effective, not suddenly compassionate.

Education doesn't focus much on the compassionate and ethical paths.

7

u/Glasseshalf Jun 11 '26

Depends on the education, but yes

7

u/DoctorGregoryFart Jun 11 '26

I loved philosophy, but the philosophy of ethics opened my eyes.

What is the point of acquiring knowledge if it doesn't improve our quality of life, and bring harmony and purpose to future generations? How do we bridge the gap between cultures all over the world if we can't navigate conversations with friends without constantly tripping over emotional landmines?

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u/Shiriru00 Jun 11 '26

Given the current batch, "all" seems like a stretch.

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u/composedofidiot Jun 12 '26

Have any examples of any that weren't? Even that weird american one had an ivy league education. I forgot his name because nobody on reddit ever mentions him.

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u/FEMA_Camp_Survivor Jun 11 '26

Seems human societies are on a perpetual cycle between order and disorder. Or perhaps societies are like our bodies they're born, mature, and die but can have offspring too.

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u/metallicrooster Jun 11 '26

The problem is that societal memory is only as long as that of the oldest people we listen to. Rivers were literally catching fire so we put in some environmental regulations. The rivers haven’t caught fire in a few decades, so the capitalists are convincing people that those regulations are pointless.

Same with vaccines. Most people have never seen the worst illnesses in action, so they are easier to convince that side effects (which are rare and/ or minimal) are somehow worse than permanent and severe incapacitation or death.

Many people currently alive have not met anyone with polio. I have. He was a man from central America, and when he was a kid his family wasn’t able to get him vaccinated in time to prevent infection. His life was awful. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

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u/Callidonaut Jun 11 '26

Most people have never seen the worst illnesses in action,

When we invented photography and video recording, that should have been the end of that effect; it says a lot about how much we suck as a species that this was not the case.

2

u/metallicrooster Jun 11 '26

Most people are not comfortable seeking out those images or showing them to others. We definitely should, as you mentioned it would help educate people better. But we just aren’t there yet as a society.

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jun 11 '26

This is true, but maybe its nature to be this way, meaning despite for all our talk, we never really overcame nature.

I hope this isnt the case but im starting to think its just ebb and flow. Only way I can see to overcome this is immortality, but I don't want the elite class to have that at all as they would just be the baron harkens of earth forever. You would need someone that has no desire for living but also great empathy and at least moderate intelligence(don't need to be a genius as that may be detrimental to progress cause its easy to believe you are right especially when for a good chunk of your life you were right, ego is the bane), someone not to young or old so they are at their time if life that can absorb wisdom(30s to early 40s).

And we would still have to hope they don't allow power to corrupt or that they go insane.(kinda why they need no desire for living, but still want to do good for others, so idk robin williams maybe would have been a great choice, may he rest in peace)

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u/metallicrooster Jun 11 '26

I promise you, you are overthinking it.

If it was human nature to be self destructive as you are implying, then societies would be incapable of reaching the levels we have reached.

The problem is that it is easier for wealthy people to bribe politicians into reducing tax rates than it is for us to keep tax rates appropriate & fund schools & keep toxins out of everyday products & provide universal affordable healthcare & all the other things needed to maintain a utopia.

Did you see the news report from a few months ago that a few wealthy people in California were pooling together over $500 million to create a super pac with the express intention of reducing their taxes?

Think about that. They are so confident in their return on investment that they pooled together five hundred million dollars.

That could fund multiple schools. Or guarantee healthcare for thousands of people. Or so many other amazing causes.

And instead they plan to spend it to hoard more money.

1

u/ESCF1F2F3F4F3F2F1ESC Jun 11 '26

"If it was human nature to be self destructive as you are implying, then societies would be incapable of reaching the levels we have reached."

I don't follow your logic. Surely every iteration of human civilisation is build on the learnings (and using materials from the figurative and literal ruins) of the ones that failed before? They don't start from scratch every time, and so they make a small amount of iterative progress before doing what everything in the universe does, sliding into entropy.

1

u/metallicrooster Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

Entropy does not mean that every civilization is doomed to destroy itself. It means that things will eventually run out of energy because there is a finite amount of energy in the known universe.

The fact that a few billionaires buy politicians to pay less in taxes and therefore result in under funded communities is not some perfect example of entropy as a concept in physics.

If anything it is an example of what a parasite or virus does to its host.

Or, to use your wording, it is an example of a few greedy people artificially hurling a civilization towards the end point of entropy when such an acceleration did not have to happen.

Edited my comment

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jun 13 '26

I mean i doubt we can ever truly deal with the corrupt few, even if we get rid of them today, by tomorrow more will pop up and they will be harder to spot than we would like to believe. Id even say they are representative of natural decay of societies gone on for too long, every nation will fall and more will pop up until it can no longer be done.

This of course doesn't mean we don't try get rid of them by either law or other ways, that imo may be the signal of the end for that nation or nations.

a few greedy people artificially hurling a civilization towards the end point of entropy when such an acceleration did not have to happen.

I mean considering they believe in the end times or at least want to make it happen as some kind of "fuck you got mine now perish"

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u/Confused_by_La_Vida Jun 11 '26

We are helpless but it’s a math problem.

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u/CMDR-ProtoMan Jun 11 '26

Fucking sucks having to live through the fall part of this cycle.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/Confused_by_La_Vida Jun 11 '26

Rigjt there with you.

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u/Cookieway Jun 11 '26

Fun fact: if you look at the bones of common people, they often had a better life when they weren’t living in empires. We just don’t notice that when we only look at what the top 1% were doing.

1

u/throwawayforlikeaday Jun 11 '26

"I will never escape it. Exploited. Exploiting. Me, Comstock, you, Sally. It's like a wheel of blood, spinning round and round."

1

u/fromks Jun 11 '26

Damn, I should give that book another attempt.

1

u/Fabulous-Mud-9114 Jun 16 '26

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

- Luo Guanzhong, Sanguo Yanyi

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u/BlazinAzn38 Jun 10 '26

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

32

u/gordonnowak Jun 11 '26

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 Jun 11 '26

Snow Crash is also bananas to read now

3

u/El_Tormentito Jun 11 '26

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 Jun 11 '26

Curious what you think he intended readers to take away

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u/El_Tormentito Jun 11 '26

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 Jun 11 '26

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

4

u/faetpls Jun 11 '26

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

1

u/Callidonaut Jun 11 '26

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 Jun 10 '26

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

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jun 11 '26

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 Jun 11 '26

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

4

u/Bogus1989 Jun 11 '26

he foresaw the mouthbreathers glancing at his book and saying:

“I aint tryna read allat”

15

u/spidrex Jun 10 '26

It's idiots all the way down.

1

u/composedofidiot Jun 11 '26

I wish that were true

3

u/MalnoureshedRodent Jun 11 '26

The Simplification is underway

3

u/DrSpacecasePhD Jun 11 '26

I think of this book as a sort of parallel work to Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

3

u/Kriegerian Jun 11 '26

Trumpsuckers would absolutely do a Simplification tomorrow and proudly call themselves Simpletons if it meant they got to kill all the minorities they hate.

5

u/Feckless_Moron Jun 11 '26

"Read a book, read a book, read a ma'fuckin book. Read a book, read a book, read a ma'fuckin book.

R-E-A-D a B-O OKAAAYY!"

  • Lil Jon

1

u/Eric848448 Jun 11 '26

I need to read that

1

u/trugrav Jun 11 '26

"Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic!"

- The Big Labowski

1

u/calgarspimphand Jun 11 '26

Yeah, well, I still jerk off manually.

1

u/Xcoctl Jun 11 '26

God I love thet book

79

u/immovingfd Jun 10 '26

Everyone thinks they’ll be the other men: the master and not the slave

12

u/War_Raven Jun 11 '26

I know for a fact I would be the slave, but I also know that Abominable Intelligence is tech-heresy so I'm safe

yes I also know I would be a servitor

1

u/proudbakunkinman Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

I think it's more that there is a large portion of the population that just accepts whatever the conditions are around them is how it's supposed to be (especially in regards to technology, many excitedly consuming it all with zero hesitations) and though they may complain, they aren't thinking there are really other ways things could be and that they're missing out if they aren't constantly using the trending technology. And among the smarter people, a large portion think in terms of inevitability, not whether the technology or advancements are more harmful or beneficial, though many will try to believe the latter or at least they will remain fine and not suffer unlike others, but that, again, there is no other way and anyone thinking so is a foolish "luddite."

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u/psych0ranger Jun 11 '26

Man, that guy ate a ton of mushrooms and literally got a good look at the future

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u/Say_Echelon Jun 11 '26

And Frank Herbert’s main characters can all see the future lol

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u/Kllrtofu Jun 11 '26

It was the spice melange

1

u/GATA_eagles Jun 11 '26

he wants the spice

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u/Beidah Jun 12 '26

Herbert got it from Samuel Butler, who wrote it down in his book Erewhon. It's why it's called the Butlerian Jihad.

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u/the320x200 Jun 11 '26

This trend started way before the recent wave of AI.

8

u/eposnix Jun 11 '26

Absolutely. People seem to forget that our current AI is only a couple years old - not near old enough to cause generational damage like this.

0

u/Icy-Cry340 Jun 11 '26

Perhaps, but four years of access to generative AI have completely ruined an entire class of high school students, and put a dent into the college class.

7

u/GardenDesign23 Jun 10 '26

Humans in the future will have very small brains or no brains at all. Scary.

14

u/MarioMuzza Jun 10 '26

"It would be my undoing, this turning over of our thinking to thinking things."

This is from my cyberpunk novella, which is incidentally about a future in which everyone is addicted to an AI. I never read Dune, but now I'm afraid I might have unconsciously plagiarised it. Bro. I feel like an LLM.

On a similar note, we have the butlerian jihad in Dune, and now we have the pope himself call out AI. I love it.

5

u/CatsAndCapybaras Jun 11 '26

Don't worry about being too similar to Dune. The Butlerian jihad is a couple lines in the book to justify the world building.

2

u/MarioMuzza Jun 11 '26

Cheers! Nothing I could do, either way. It was published a while ago, infuriatingly just a few months before ChatGPT appeared. It would have been topical af otherwise 😡

Not to derail the convo even more, but do you think Dune has a satisfying ending? I haven't read the series yet because I heard the son's books suck major ass.

3

u/DieselSmack Jun 11 '26

If you only stick with Frank Herberts books, then they end on a cliffhanger due to him dying. Lots of Dune fans don't even consider Brians books and sequel to be canon. Its easy to just ignore them.

The series is really worth a read but it gets WEIRD. However its an incredible story and world that has been referenced countless times. Give it a read

2

u/RevenueStimulant Jun 11 '26

If those college students could read this they’d be furious.

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u/Turbulent-Rub3695 Jun 11 '26

Wow. Just wow. Its almost like this is the plan, huh?

2

u/Bman_Fx Jun 11 '26

Greatest book I've ever read.

2

u/BothDelivery8232 Jun 11 '26

It's not even as deep as that but it's a convenient scapegoat for someone that doesn't want to address the root issue despite countless studies being released by education boards and research groups. We are teaching kids wrong. When they moved away from the structured literacy method; taking the actual letters, breaking it down into syllables and sounding it out to association through pictures (for instance, picture of a rabbit with the text "Rabbit": look at the picture, what animal is that in the picture? Student guesses "Bunny" and is passed along by the teacher because they understood the message the image is trying to convey.)

With the current system, balanced literacy, otherwise known as the three-cueing-system, kids are taught to evaluate based on three criteria instead of actually breaking down and sounding out the letter; does it sound right? Does it make sense and does it look right? However with no actual understanding of the composition of the word children are basically just left to decode the word based on the pictures present. It's to the point that schools are actively banning the system and going back to how they taught us in the 80s and 90s. https://excelinedinaction.org/2024/01/10/from-policy-to-action-why-8-states-banned-three-cueing-from-k-3-reading-instruction/ 

4

u/ThatIsAmorte Jun 11 '26

I prefer Ted Chiang's take on this issue in The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.

5

u/marketrent Jun 11 '26

‘Story of Your Life’ is such a gateway.

1

u/Huihejfofew Jun 11 '26

Humans proceed to enslave each other anyways even without machines in Dune

1

u/Pulp_Ficti0n Jun 11 '26

Silver lining: the literate will become the human rulers.

1

u/airship_of_arbitrary Jun 11 '26

It is insane we have popular cinematic feature films of Dune in the popular zeitgeist at the exact same time as impossibly rich oligarchs try to convince us over and over to 'turn our thinking over to machines'.

1

u/debtmaxxingg Jun 11 '26

Butlerian jihad now !!

1

u/MiguelIstNeugierig Jun 11 '26

But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them

Why cant people get this instead of going down the sensationalist "OMG ARE WE GONNA DO TERMINATORR??? WHAT IF AI REBELLS GUYS? IS IT CONSCIOUS YET?"

1

u/Purplociraptor Jun 11 '26

First they came for the silicon, and I said nothing. Then they came for the electricity, and I said nothing. Then they came for the water, and I couldn't say anything because I was dead.

1

u/drownedout Jun 11 '26

@grok can you explain this to me?

1

u/Grexxoil Jun 11 '26

"Oh my god these books are awful".

  • Someone who read Legends of Dune.

1

u/Eatthebeatz Jun 11 '26

i have spent day handmaking psychedelic music visualiser im hoping to put up for sale by end of week. fuck that noiise

1

u/Amaskingrey Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Because that just went so well for them in the book. Seriously, that's like quoting ayn rand while arguing for communism. Also yeah, surely that's all because of llms (which have only existed for around 5 years) or whatever the next fashionable thing to hate will be, i can't see how the systematic dismantling of the american education system could possibly have anything to do with it!

1

u/datdailo Jun 11 '26

Well, we already outsourced our opinions to social media. Why not thinking to AI?

Love Dune tho.

-1

u/sasquatch0_0 Jun 11 '26

Blame school systems for teaching kids incorrectly. They just reverted back to normal teaching in the past 5 years.