The original title of this article was “Does the Age of Artificial Intelligence Still Need Reading?”, published in China Science Daily (2023-04-21, p. 1, News, the title was changed to “Do We Still Need to ‘Read’ in the Age of ‘Scrolling’?”》, and on the WeChat public account the title was changed again to Just for This Reason, in the Age of “Scrolling” We Still Need to “Read”. I myself think the newspaper title is better, so I use it here. What follows is the original draft; it was lightly polished for publication, and when citing it, please use the newspaper version.
World Book Day is coming again soon. Books are the ladder of human progress; the history of books is as old as human civilization itself, yet World Book Day is a relatively new holiday, established by UNESCO in 1995.
1995 can be called the first year of the “Internet age.” That year, the U.S. government withdrew from NSFNET, marking the transformation of the internet from a public-spirited infrastructure serving a small number of programmers and scholars into a commercial infrastructure serving the general public. In the same year, Amazon opened for business, eBay opened for business, and the Netscape browser went public on Nasdaq, ushering in the opening sequence of the internet startup boom and the stock-market bubble.
The establishment of World Book Day amid the internet craze of 1995 may have been nothing more than a coincidence. But why did this holiday not appear earlier? “Reading” has a history of at least 5,000 years; “publishing and intellectual property” have a history of at least 500 years; and UNESCO had just passed its 50th anniversary. Why was it only at this point that someone remembered to establish a holiday to promote “reading, publishing, and the protection of intellectual property”?
Whether intentional or not, the establishment of this holiday somewhat reflects the fact that the ancient activity of “reading” was encountering a new crisis. Digital technology rapidly came to dominate the ways human beings obtain information and pass the time, and these two functions are precisely the main functions of “reading.”
But isn’t concentrating on a computer screen also a kind of “reading”? A “webpage” seems to be a more advanced kind of page: not only combining text and images, but also allowing free jumping around. In principle, everything that can be read in books can be placed on the internet, where it can be obtained more conveniently and cheaply. In that sense, information technology seems to have greatly promoted “reading”; so where is the crisis?
But “reading,” at bottom, is a human activity. It is not merely a question of how information flows and is presented; it is also a question of how people immerse themselves in reading and enjoy reading. If people are no longer willing to immerse themselves in the activity of reading, if they are no longer able to derive pleasure from reading, then no matter how efficient the flow of information becomes, the meaning of “reading” must be reconsidered.
After the rise of the mobile internet, acquiring information became even more convenient, and one could encounter vast amounts of information anytime and anywhere. But the crisis facing reading became even more apparent. Faced with information on our phones, our action is no longer “reading,” but “scrolling.” Nor is the unit in which information is presented still books one by one; it has long since become fragmented “text messages” and “WeChat posts.” In the end, most people don’t have the patience to read even a 140-character Weibo post carefully; they would rather spend more time watching short videos than patiently read, word by word and sentence by sentence, even a popular-science article.
When the object of “reading” changes from books, to articles, to fragmented Weibo posts, and then to eye-catching short videos, what have we lost? In short—perhaps alarmingly so—we have lost “freedom.”
The key question is: what exactly is the purpose of reading? What exactly do we gain from reading? Is it merely to be able to summarize the “main idea” of each chapter? Is it merely to obtain a few words of “final conclusion”?
Many people really do think this way. On the internet, we can find a large number of so-called guide videos, such as “Reading Fortress Besieged in 10 Minutes,” “Reading The Iliad in 10 Minutes,” “Reading Jane Eyre in 3 Minutes,” “Reading The Crowd in 3 Minutes” … Sometimes people even watch such videos at double speed, as if they could directly “read a book in one sentence.”
Yet if the meaning of reading a book can be explained in a few minutes, if it can be summarized in a few hundred characters, then why did authors through the ages go to all the trouble of writing manuscripts of hundreds of thousands of words? Were they themselves incapable of writing summaries? If 10,000 words can convey the information, why write 100,000; if a few hundred words can make the conclusion clear, what meaning is there in all the remaining space?
In fact, books can of course be summarized, distilled, and compressed. But the meaning of a good book lies precisely in what cannot be compressed—this is true of both scholarly works and recreational reading alike.
For instance, the reason a novel can provide amusement is precisely because of its rich plot, its suspense-filled story, and its moving rhetorical details. A detective novel can perhaps be boiled down to 500 characters that explain the causes and consequences of the events, but then reading it would be utterly uninteresting. And for an academic or philosophical work, the conclusion itself is only a relatively secondary part. How insights are initiated, how questions are posed, how one gently leads the reader in and peels back the layers to cut to the heart of the matter, and finally how one establishes an argument with reason and evidence, step by step and link by link … the entire process of thought and argument is where the charm of an academic book lies.
Perhaps someone will say that the ultimate contribution of these academic books to human progress is, after all, only their conclusions. That is indeed true—but if one remembers only the conclusions and does not read the arguments, how can one criticize the existing conclusions? If one merely treats countless conclusions as ready-made, fixed things to memorize, and cannot critically enter into dialogue with the giants of the past, how is it possible to stand on the shoulders of giants and go one step further?
What is called “freedom” is nothing other than these two levels: first, on the level of mass entertainment, freedom is the right to enjoy leisure, to be able to immerse oneself at ease in one’s own interests; second, for elite scholars, freedom refers specifically to critical thinking and an independent attitude, refusing unconditional obedience to ready-made authority and dogma, and not being satisfied with simple conclusions but always wanting to investigate the roots personally and trace matters back to their source. On both of these levels, books have played a role that is difficult to replace, and even today they cannot be completely replaced by new media.
The internet can indeed provide efficient entertainment stimulation and information input, but the experience of going online can never fully replace the immersive quality and independence of reading. Being addicted to the internet and being immersed in books are completely different things. To immerse oneself in books is an act of intense concentration, of highly focused attention—when reading novels, one places oneself inside the story world and cannot extricate oneself; when reading specialized works, one enters the author’s world of thought and converses with the author across distance … But being addicted to the internet often means being in a state of constant “distraction,” of dispersed attention—you can never remain on any one “page,” and instead cannot help but “scroll” the current focus away as quickly as possible, constantly refreshing and switching.
The more people become accustomed to “scrolling,” the harder it becomes for them to enter a state of “reading.” Whether for amusement or for thinking, they pursue “fast food” rather than sedimentation. Thus, the “non-readers” of the internet age become more prone, in matters of amusement, to restlessness or to contenting themselves with flashy stimulation, while in matters of thought they are more likely to fall into dogmatism, placing weight on positions and conclusions while slighting criticism and argument.
As the development of the mobile internet reached its peak, artificial intelligence technologies represented by ChatGPT suddenly burst forth. Where, then, will this lead the fate of reading? GPT large models can swiftly read all the digitized books that have survived in human history up to the present, can effectively summarize the conclusions and general ideas of any book or article, and can even answer questions at any time, responding to any question you may have about a certain book. If artificial intelligence is no longer about reading a book in 3 minutes, but about reading “all books” in one breath—and reading them more deeply and meticulously than those video makers, while summarizing them more briefly and accurately—then do human beings still need to keep reading?
If the meaning of reading lies in grasping ready-made conclusions, in simply and efficiently completing “information processing,” then the rise of artificial intelligence does indeed mean that there is no longer any need for humans to read books, because in terms of the efficiency of reading and summarizing information, perhaps the entire human race together still cannot match a single advanced artificial intelligence.
But the rise of artificial intelligence may also be an opportunity, forcing humanity to reexamine the meaning of reading. All human skills and professions may be replaced by others or by machines; only “freedom” cannot be replaced. In the age of artificial intelligence, if human beings are still pursuing freedom, then the meaning of reading will never perish.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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