itstargetnews
“Human intelligence,” cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is one of the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to disrupt it, suppress it, or even destroy it. “
The year is 1988, a former Hollywood actor is in the White House, and the Postman is concerned about the rise of pictures of words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to understand the world through fragmentary pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argues in an essay in his book. Conscientious Objections. “A culture doesn’t need to force scholars to flee to make them impotent. A culture doesn’t need to burn books to make sure they can’t be read. . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity. “
What seemed ominous in 1988 reads like a prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the result in a wide-ranging exercise: in-person assessments of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills in 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 reading and writing skills are striking. Skills improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the largest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
Among adults with tertiary level education (such as university graduates), literacy fell in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while almost all countries and economies experienced a decline in literacy among adults have less than a high school education. Singapore and the US have the largest disparities in literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans are reading at a level you would expect from a 10-year-old,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me – referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored . literacy level 1 or below. “It’s hard to imagine – that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties in reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the deterioration is partly explained by an aging population and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher said these factors alone do not fully account for the trend. Postman’s own assumption is not surprising: that technology has changed the way most of us consume information, from longer, more complex texts, such as books and newspaper articles, to short . social media posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media makes it more likely that you “read things that confirm your views, instead of engaging with different views, and that’s what you need to reach (the highest level) of ( OECD literacy) assessment, where you have to distinguish fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The political implications and the quality of the public debate are already evident. This, too, was foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote a article called “Twilight of the Books” by The New Yorker magazine about the possible appearance of a post-literate culture. In oral cultures, he writes, cliché and stereotype 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 that the conflicts of the past should be taken into account”. Does that sound familiar?
These trends are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Finland shows the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to maintain a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improved schooling can make: there, the literacy skills of 16-24-year-olds are better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI will alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more difficult. Systems like ChatGPT do a lot of reading and writing tasks well: they can parse reams of information and reduce it to summaries.
A number of studies suggest that, when deployed in the workplace, these tools can increase the performance of low-skilled workers. on a studyresearchers tracked the impact of an AI tool on customer service agents providing technical support through written chat boxes. The AI tool, trained on the conversational patterns of top performers, provides 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 methods became more similar to those of higher-skilled workers.
David Autor, a professor of economics at MIT, further argues that AI tools will enable more workers to perform. higher skilled roles and help restore “the middle-skilled, middle-class heart of the US labor market”.
But, as Autor says, to really use a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent foundation to start with. Without that, Schleicher worries that people with poor reading and writing skills will become “passive consumers of prefabricated content”.
In other words, without your own strong skills, it is only a few short steps from supporting the machine, to find yourself dependent on it, or subject to it.
