Cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote: “Human intelligence is among the weakest things in nature.” It doesn't take much to disrupt it, suppress it, or even destroy it.”
It was 1988, a former Hollywood star in the White House, and Postman was worried about the rise of images over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “sets our minds to grasp the world through broken images and forces other media to look in that direction,” he said in an essay in his book. Conscientious Objection. “Culture does not have to force academics to run away from power. The custom is not to burn books to ensure they will not be read. . . There are other ways to get stupid. “
What may have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads even more prophetic from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released results of the big exercise: a personal assessment 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 tests a decade earlier, the trends in literacy were striking. Efficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and decreased significantly in 11, with significant deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
Among adults with high levels education (such as university graduates), literacy decreased in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while almost all countries and economies experienced a decline in literacy among adults with less than secondary education. Singapore and the US had huge disparities in literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans read at a level you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, told me – referring to the percentage of the US population that scored. level 1 or lower in literacy. “It's hard to imagine – that every third person you meet on the street has difficulty learning even simple things.”
In some countries, the decline is partly explained by an aging population and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully explain the situation. His own hypothesis would not surprise Postman: that technology has changed the way most of us consume information, away from long, complex writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to shorter ones. Social media posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it easier for you to “read things that confirm your views, rather than engage with different views, and that's what you have to get to (at high levels) in the (OECD literacy) test, where you want to separate fact from opinion, look for ambiguities , manage complexity,” Schleicher said.
The political implications and quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, author Caleb Crain wrote the point called “Twilight of the Books” in the New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literacy culture might look like. In an oral culture, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are valued because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in the culture of learning to read that the inconsistencies of the past need to be reported.” Does that sound familiar?
These trends are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Finland shows the possibility of high quality education and strong social norms to maintain a highly educated population, even in the country where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improving education can make: there, the literacy skills of 16-24 year olds are much better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI can reduce or increase the problem is a very difficult one. Programs like ChatGPT can work well for many reading and writing tasks: they can analyze knowledge tests and reduce them to summaries.
Many studies show that, when placed in the workplace, these tools can significantly increase the performance of low-skilled workers. In a one lessonresearchers tracked the impact of AI tools on customer service agents who provide technical support through text chat boxes. An AI tool, trained on the conversation patterns of top players, provided real-time text suggestions to agents on how to respond to customers. The study found low-skilled workers were more productive and their communication patterns were similar to those of high-skilled workers.
David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, has even argued that AI tools could make more workers more efficient. highly skilled roles and help restore “the middle skills, the heart of the middle class to the US labor market”.
But, as Autor says, in order to effectively use the tool to “boost” your skills, you need the right foundation to start with. Besides, Schleicher worries that people with low reading skills will be “ignorant users of tailored content”.
In other words, without strong skills yourself, it is a few short steps from being supported by a machine, to finding yourself dependent on it, or dependent on it.