Reading and listening are slow, low-bandwidth ways to move knowledge into the brain.

Hybrid intelligence could install knowledge directly, turning a years-long climb into a transfer.

The risk is losing judgment: Whoever controls the upload controls the mind, so we must keep teaching thinking.

We treat reading as bedrock, the floor beneath everything else we build. The data suggest the floor is giving way. Recent reporting on adult skills indicates that a majority of American adults now read below a sixth-grade level, a figure that translates into well over 100 million people. The trend shows no sign of flattening. On the most recent international adult-skills assessment, average U.S. literacy scores fell between 2017 and 2023, and the share of adults scoring at the lowest proficiency levels rose sharply over that same period.

The young are not rescuing us. The 2024 Nation's Report Card showed reading scores declining from pre-pandemic levels at both fourth and eighth grade, with a record proportion of eighth-graders failing to reach even the NAEP Basic benchmark. In reading, students now score roughly where their counterparts did in the early 1990s. These declines began more than a decade ago, and their persistence since the pandemic suggests they cannot be explained by COVID-19 alone.

Here is the detail that should unsettle anyone hoping we will simply sleep off a temporary disruption. We have already run the obvious experiments. Phonics. The "science of reading." Emergency funding. The line keeps bending downward.

So permit me a heresy. Consider the possibility that reading is itself a technology rather than a permanent feature of human nature. Writing is barely 5,000 years old. Mass literacy is a few centuries old at most. We mistake its familiarity for permanence. Technologies, however beloved, eventually get superseded. The horse was not saved by better saddles.

Imagining the End of Formal Education and Reading

In an article called, "The Eve of Education's End," I........

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