Daily Grind July 17, 2025: AI and the Future of Reading
Welcome to Tech's morning newsletter, featuring one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to ponder
Good morning!
Welcome to The Daily Grind for Thursday, July 17.
Today’s post is a little different. Last night I read an essay in The New Yorker by Joshua Rothman:
I found the article on HackerNews, of all places, but it tied together some interesting themes that I’ve been thinking about recently: The future of reading, the role of books, and AI’s impact on those things.
So today’s Headline is more of an essay on my thoughts on reading and AI. I hope you find it insightful, but it’s far from a finished topic for me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
📰 One Headline: AI and the Future of Reading
In the age of AI, what is the role of reading?
As a publisher, I am asking myself this question daily. But it’s also in the public interest: What sort of society will we become if we stop reading?
According to some statistics, we have been sliding into that reality for a couple decades. Reading—and reading comprehension—is down across the population, and especially for young people.
But these statistics are hard to trust, and Joshua Rothman, a writer for The New Yorker, points out that they may be misleading.
“One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.”
Rothman recently covered the topic of reading in The New Yorker, and tried to imagine what AI would do to our written world.
He points out that economist Tyler Cowen recently admitted to “writing for AI,” so that his ideas would be absorbed into the general body of human work, housed in LLMs, for all of eternity.
As for the reader, Rothman believes preferred reading formats will change, but the habit will not. People will still read, but it will become more personal and catered to the individual.
Rothman makes the case that maybe, like music, photography, video, and memes, written works will become fungible and remixable—like a song that is remixed as a dance track, or a video clip that becomes a meme.
I recoiled at the idea of fungible writing at first, but the more I thought and read about it, the more examples I found.
Rothman shares the example of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a series of publications that took full-length novels and cut them down to half its size. These truncated works sold 10 million copies… back in 1987. Rothman, who studied for his Ph.D in English, grew up with a set of these books in his home.
My wife made another great analogy on our walk last night: The works of Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet, for example—have been recreated and reimagined over and over again for centuries.
But what would modern, living authors think of their works being remixed in real time, immediately after their release? Again, we are living with one foot in this future already.
There are Cliffnotes and Sparknotes of course, which any delinquent high schooler like me will remember. Newer examples are platforms like Blinkest, which creates 15-minute summaries of popular non-fiction books to be read or listened to.
In a way, audiobooks are an example of remixed writing. Audiobooks are the fastest growing book format but a long shot, and people really are reading more because of them (and apparently listening to a book activates the same parts of your brain as reading).
But is all written work created equal? Does fungible writing have the same impact on us as concrete, unadulterated works? This is where I, personally, become worried.
Transitioning from a Written to Oratory Society
Derek Thomson recently did a deep dive on “The End of Reading,” anchored by troubling statistics about the rate of reading across the entire population, but particularly with young people (again, these statistics can be hard to trust).
But this is the key point from Thompson that still troubles me:
The end of reading could spell the end of our written society and a return to an oratory society—something we have not experienced in almost 600 years.
An oratory society is more fluid and social, but can also be more dogmatic and chaotic. Imagine the lively banter of group conversation at a party. It’s fun and engaging. Now expand that to the scale of an entire society, and you have something like our current culture: millions of people vying for attention, talking over one another, and saying anything to be aggregated by social media.
By contrast, a written society—the kind we lived in from the time of Gutenberg to (arguably) the advent of social media—is able to codify their ideas, share them widely, and allow others to build on them. Would the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution have happened without books, pamphlets, and essays? I would not want to play out an alternate scenario to find out.
Maybe AI will play a positive role in enhancing our written society, even if it’s different from the one we’ve had for centuries. Rothman makes a good point here:
“It’s certainly possible to imagine that intelligent reading machines will help us find value in texts that would otherwise go unread. (The process could be a little like fossil-fuel extraction: old, specialized, or difficult writing could be utilized, in condensed form, to power new thinking.)”
For example, if you and I both want to read Ulysses, but you’re a sicko and I have a new baby on the way, you could read the original and I could read a version that is 50%(or maybe 75%) shorter. Would I miss some of the magic and nuance? Of course. But I would be able to have a conversation about it. It would still be time well spent.
And maybe AI helps us comprehend and remember these works as well. Rothman goes on:
“There could also be scenarios in which L.L.M.s extend and deepen our reading memories. If I’d studied for my exams with an A.I. by my side, and then kept discussing my reading with that same A.I. year after year, I might build something like a living commonplace book, a thinking diary.”
But I am not still sure a written society can exist on fungible works. One key benefit of a written society is the shared understanding we build from the concrete nature of written work. If all works become fungible, how much shared understanding will we lose?
I can imagine both hopeful and tragic scenarios for books, reading, and their impact on our world.
In the hopeful sense, it would be great if AI resurfaced old, classic works and remixed them for the modern generation. This is something that has happened for millennia, from the works of Shakespeare to the Bible. AI could do this en masse, but can it capture the heart and soul of human works the way another human can?
The tragic scenario is best encapsulated by the HackerNews user asimpletune, who has the top comment on Rothman’s article:
”Summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.”
This comment gets to the heart of my biggest fear: The loss of shared understanding.
Written works allow us to “build on the shoulders of giants,” as well as empathize with our fellow man. We don’t know the impact of an AI intermediary on that connection, and we likely won’t until it’s too late.
🔗 A Few Good Links
Here are a few more stories for you to explore:
Smithsonian Magazine: ‘Reading Rainbow’ was created to combat summer reading slumps (via HackerNews)
Carta: The Bootstrapped Solo Founder Era is Now (via Ben Lang)
TechCrunch: Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics with $80M to automate construction
TechCrunch: Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch
📚 One Page: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
Maybe I am being too precious with the written language, the way aging people always do.
After all, isn’t this newsletter simply a remix of other people’s writings?
I’m blushing.
Steven Pinker reminds me that language is fluid—and has always been so—in his must-read book on writing, The Sense of Style.
Here is a passage to pull us back from the ledge:
Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth. For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them.
The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Yet the authors of the classic manuals wrote as if the language they grew up with were immortal, and failed to cultivate an ear for ongoing change. Strunk and White, writing in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, condemned then-new verbs like personalize, finalize, host, chair, and debut, and warned writers never to use fix for “repair” or claim for “declare.” Worse, they justified their peeves with cockamamie rationalizations. The verb contact, they argued, is “vague and self-important. Do not contact people; get in touch with them, look them up, phone them, find them, or meet them.” But of course the vagueness of to contact is exactly why it caught on: sometimes a writer doesn’t need to know how one person will get in touch with another, as long as he does so.
Or consider this head-scratcher, concocted to explain why a writer should never use a number word with people, only with persons: “If of ‘six people’ five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people.” By the same logic, writers should avoid using numbers with irregular plurals such as men, children, and teeth (“If of ‘six children’ five went away…”).
In the last edition published in his lifetime, White did acknowledge some changes to the language, instigated by “youths” who “speak to other youths in a tongue of their own devising: they renovate the language with a wild vigor, as they would a basement apartment.” White’s condescension to these “youths” (now in their retirement years) led him to predict the passing of nerd, psyched, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky, all of which have become entrenched in the language.
The graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an underappreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology. As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it.⁵
Maybe the kids will be alright, books will be alright, and the world will go on.
❓ One Question: What role does writing play in your life?
One thing I know for sure: The act of writing is a powerful tool for just about everything.
The way exercise is the miracle drug for your body, writing is the miracle drug for your mind. So today’s question:
What role does writing play in your life?
And the follow up:
How else could you incorporate writing to improve your life and work?
Need a hand to get back into writing? Let me shamelessly plug my book:
Great Founders Write: Principles for Clear Thinking, Confident Writing, and Startup Success
I include tips on the writing process as well as over a dozen writing exercises to get you started. If you want to read but don’t want to pay for it, send me a message and I’ll share the PDF.
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:
That’s it for today! Thank you as always for reading. If you could, please leave a rating below:
Talk to you tomorrow!
Cheers,
Ben