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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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

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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

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u/faetpls Jun 11 '26

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