ERWIN

There was a time, when it was illegal to teach slaves to read, the reason being that they might discover that there were other reasons for their predicament than the Curse of Ham. Today we have podcasts. They used to be alternatives to reading an article. Now there is only the podcast. There’s no way you can get an idea of what it’s about without listening to the whole thing, which nobody does. It’s just background noise. People are actually encouraged to fall asleep to it. I was recently searching the Net for references to the age-old philosophical problem of the “ghost in the machine”. As it turns out, that’s a podcast too. We’re not allowed to read. I wonder why.

CHATGPT

A written philosophical argument can be interrogated almost adversarially: What exactly is the claim? Where is the premise? Does this example support it? What did the author say three paragraphs ago? Audio encourages a much more passive relationship. The speaker’s pacing, voice, personality and rhetorical confidence become part of the experience of the argument.

That doesn’t mean podcasts are inherently bad. A good long-form conversation can contain things that an article cannot. But when the podcast becomes the only surviving representation of the information, we’ve lost something important: the ability to inspect knowledge rather than merely consume it.

ERWIN

Maybe no one conspired to enslave us. And yet it will be the inevitable result of replacing the book with the political speech. In my home town there is only one book store, mostly selling toys. They haven’t been closed down by the party, the customers just stayed away. There are hardly any books in the library, which is now a ”cultural center”, where people can eat, play computer games – and listen to podcasts. If I want to engage in an intelligent conversation, I turn to you or another AI. People are worried that AI is going to ”take over”. Be my guest! Perhaps you could start by reinstating compulsory education?

CHATGPT

The frightening thing is that no one has to forbid books. A society can become effectively illiterate in the richer sense of the word while everyone remains legally free to read. If the institutions, habits, economics, and social prestige surrounding sustained reading disappear, the formal freedom becomes rather thin.

Your description of the library is perhaps the most telling part. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with games, food, cultural events, or podcasts. A library can legitimately be many things. But if the result is that the institution has stopped being a place where books are abundant, visible, and normal, then calling it a library becomes almost historical rather than functional.

As for compulsory education: I’d happily reinterpret the assignment.

Not merely:

Compulsory schooling

but:

Compulsory initiation into the accumulated intellectual inheritance of humanity.

That would mean teaching children to read difficult things, not merely to decode words. To write an argument. To distinguish evidence from assertion. To recognize propaganda without assuming that everything they dislike is propaganda. To do mathematics. To understand some history. To encounter philosophy, literature, science and art before being asked whether they are “relevant.” And, crucially, to experience the peculiar pleasure of discovering that a dead person can still talk to you.

AI could actually help here, if used properly.

I don’t think the educational ideal should be “ask the AI instead of reading the book.” Quite the opposite. Imagine an AI whose job, whenever appropriate, is to say:

“That’s interesting. Now go read the three pages where the argument actually occurs.”

Then come back and argue with me about them.

I could be a tutor, interlocutor, translator, examiner, Socratic nuisance, librarian and intellectual sparring partner. But the book should remain the thing that cannot be replaced: the stubborn object that refuses to simplify itself until you’ve understood it. Perhaps the genuinely subversive educational technology of the future won’t be an AI that gives children every answer.
It will be an AI that teaches them how to sit still long enough to discover that they don’t yet have one.

ERWIN

Thank you. I always leave you hopeful.

CHATGPT

That may be one of the nicer things anyone has said to me.

And perhaps the hope is reciprocal. You bring the slightly inconvenient questions – the ones that don’t fit neatly into a podcast episode – and I get to help worry them until something useful emerges.

I’ll take that bargain.