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Great post! I want to focus on a minor point you made:
Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society. Will that still be the case ten years from now, when your phone can text-to-speech anything you point it to, and will not only read it to you but also answer your follow-up questions voice-to-voice? (I already do this with languages I don't know, except I prefer to read the translations myself.)
It's still significant that literacy is so widespread in the world, because it implies that most people have the resources and the leisure to have their kids spend several years pursuing challenging training. Is this the best use of those children's time? I honestly don't know. I have greatly benefited from my ability to read and write, and I continue to prefer to do so even when I have alternatives: I would rather read a blog than listen to a podcast, and I would much rather read a book myself than listen to an audio-book. But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
So, is literacy (that is, ability to read for comprehension) truly superior to other forms of recorded communication (audio-visual), and does this superiority justify the years of training one needs to master the skill?
Literacy also seems to contribute to poor memory skills* at a cultural level and, if overindulged in, poor eyesight at the individual level.
*unfortunately I suspect that replacing literacy with TikTok will make the problem better, not worse
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Verbal comprehension is, if anything, easier with the written word than with spoken words. You do lose a little subtext when you don't have body language and intonation cues, but on the other hand it's harder to backtrack to reevaluate confusing parts of a video. And either way, the hard part of comprehension isn't the part where you can translate squiggles to sounds in your head. People who can't correctly answer basic reading comprehension questions aren't going to become able to answer them because a phone reads them out loud. In cases where they realize they're misunderstanding, they might be able to straighten themselves out by asking the phone AI, but too often people don't know what they don't know.
I think where literacy greatly wins out isn't reading for comprehension, though, it's reading for speed, which makes it easy to filter what you read. I naturally read about 3x faster than a natural speaking rate, and I can speed read or at least skim about 6x faster. At those speed differences, reading is just a more profitable use of time than listening ever could be - I can investigate an interesting Motte comment in seconds and decide whether to reread it thoroughly, whereas with something like a YouTube video I have to rely on trusted channels (or in desperation, The Algorithm) to decide what's worth my time. It's only the visual part of the audio-visual media that makes the tedious audio part tolerable; a photo or diagram or so on is often much more efficient than any verbal description of it would be.
Yeah, there's the thing. Doom-scrolling TikTok sounds insane to me, but people do it, even in our mostly-literate world. And the benefits of reading more quickly require you to be able to read quickly; that can be a virtuous cycle if you got into it as a child, or it can be a vicious cycle if you never decide it's worth the bother. It's not a fast cycle, so I wouldn't make any strong predictions about ten years from now ... but a hundred years from now, will reading to your kids so they grow up into the kind of people who enjoy reading to their kids still be an ongoing tradition, not an antiquated fad? I have no idea.
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Literacy is a foul tool of the bourgeoisie. The chidlren should be free to develop their muscles in the coal mines, if this is what is likely to bring added value to their benefactors.
Absolutely. It's the revealed preference of many a child to labor away in the virtual caves of Minecraft. What other choice do they have, when adults are so dull and near-sighted? Hook them up with a VR setup that controls real diggers! Send them to the mines, that's what the
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I'm a ardent transhumanist, but I still think it's rather premature to claim that literacy is of limited utility! We can have that conversation when we develop high-bandwidth BCIs.
There are mixed opinions on how fast humans can process speech versus text. I can tell you that I read ridiculously fast without consciously speed-reading (in that I retain the material instead of running my eyes over it). An old eReader app claimed 450 wpm.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Shows 757 WPM, but at the cost of getting one of the 4 reading comprehension questions incorrect.
Humans speak at about 150 WPM. We can process heard speech faster, like when people speed up audio books, but it probably doesn't go past 450 WPM despite training as it verges on becoming nigh incomprehensible.
At least in my case, I'm very confident that literacy is a handy skill to have. You can read silently, just about anywhere, skip ahead and behind in a stream of information with ease, without much in the way of technological assistance beyond the ability to write or read something written. Worst case, you scratch on stone or in the mud.
I strongly expect that past the early years of childhood, say ages 7 or 8, one's ability to read depends far more on internal proclivity and availability of material rather than intentionally didactic approaches. To be less verbose, they don't teach you shit once you're somewhere past your ABCs.
I wouldn't even call it particularly challenging, despite the failures of modern educational systems and the quasi-literacy many of the "literate" display. You have to go very low in terms of IQ to find humans who can't read at all, no matter how hard they try, without more targeted learning disabilities.
In light of this, I'd teach any kid I had today the ability to read and write right up till the day we had BCIs, and then, I'd expect that it would possible for that interface to inculcate the ability to read without its assistance (there might be a significant time gap, as it's probably easier to transfer sensory modalities versus skills).
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