Cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote: “Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It does not take much to distract, suppress, or even annihilate it.”
It was 1988, and the former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was concerned that images were taking over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to understand the world through fragmented images and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he said in an essay in his book. Conscientious objections. “Culture should not force scholars to flee to render them powerless. Culture need not burn books to ensure they are not read. . . . There are other ways of achieving stupidity.”
What might have seemed parsimonious in 1988 has become something of a prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the following report: results Large-scale exercise: Personal assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared to the last set of assessments a decade ago, the trends in literacy skills have been striking. Efficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14 countries, decreased significantly in 11 countries, and the greatest deterioration was in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
Among adults with level III education (e.g., university graduates), literacy proficiency decreased in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while almost all countries and economies saw a decline in literacy proficiency among adults with less than a secondary education. Singapore and the United States had the greatest inequality in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans read at the level you would expect a 10-year-old to do,” Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the United States who scored grades. Level 1 or lower in literacy. “It is actually difficult to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the decline is partly attributable to aging populations and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully explain the trend. His own hypothesis would not surprise Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to a shorter style. Social media Posts and videos.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that you “read things that confirm your views, rather than engaging with diverse viewpoints,” which is what you need to reach (the higher levels) in the OECD Literacy Assessment, where You need to distinguish fact from opinion, overcome ambiguity, and manage complexity.
The consequences for policy and the quality of public debate are already clear. This too was expected. In 2007, writer Caleb Crane wrote an article condition Titled “The Twilight of Books” in The New Yorker about what a post-literate culture might look like. He wrote that in oral cultures, 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 should the contradictions of the past be taken into account.” “Does this sound familiar?”
These trends are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Finland shows the potential to provide high-quality education and strong social norms to maintain a high literacy rate among the population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improving education can make: there, literacy proficiency among young people aged 16 to 24 is much better than it was a decade ago.
The question of whether artificial intelligence can alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more difficult. Systems like ChatGPT can perform well at many reading and writing tasks: they can parse large amounts of information and turn them into summaries.
A number of studies indicate that these tools, when deployed in the workplace, can significantly increase the performance of low-skilled workers. in One studyresearchers tracked the impact of the AI tool on customer service agents who provided technical support via written chat boxes. The AI tool, trained on the conversational patterns of top performers, provided real-time text suggestions to agents on how to respond to customers. The study found that low-skilled workers became more productive and their communication patterns became more similar to those of high-skilled workers.
David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, even said that AI tools could enable more workers to perform Highly skilled roles and help restore “the middle-class, middle-skilled core of the U.S. labor market.”
But, Autor says, in order to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a good foundation to start with. In the absence of this, Schleicher worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naive consumers of off-the-shelf content.”
In other words, without strong skills of your own, it only takes a few short steps from being powered by a machine to finding yourself dependent on it, or subservient to it.
