For many years, a good deal of digital ink has been spilled about the end of reading. Lately, however, I found compelling the statistics in Rose Horowitch's "The End of Reading is Here," at The Atlantic. I wish it were not behind a paywall. We all need to read it, even if we cannot focus long enough to finish it.
What I began noticing, incrementally, after the turn of the century is coming true: students (and adults) cannot abide focusing long enough to read anything. In 2001, I taught nine challenging texts in the university's Core class. In Spring of 2025, my most recent literature course, I taught four novel-length works. That was challenging enough, and still I caught students using AI to summarize a short story they couldn't finish, and getting an F for introducing AI hallucination into work submitted for a grade.
But the problem is hardly confined to young people, some of whom will claim that audio books serve as an adequate replacement. As Horowitch's sources note, those do not engage our brains neurologically in the same manner as printed books. Societally, we are losing the ability to retain facts in our heads, unpack difficult syntax, find connections between ideas when we farm those tasks out to machines.
So each year since the iPhone hit the scene in 2007, I've grown more and more certain that Sven Birkert's predictions in The Gutenberg Elegies have come true.
I've peers in their 60s who stopped reading. When they try now, they cannot finish the book. The addictive allure of screens is too great (an irony as I write this on a screen). A few of us who read (or write for) Hemmings Motor News have noted how the stories at the Web site grow shorter and shorter. When a long piece appears, such as the ones I write for them, at least one commenter will thank the author and editors for daring to take a "deep dive" into a topic.
How will this end? I probably will live to see a post-literate society as the norm, a world where serious reading of difficult material becomes a niche skill. Bookstores now doing well may need to stock shorter work to bring in new readers. College English Departments, as well as any teaching from books have not been in great shape for a while. They will morph or go out of business.
All my life, I have had an eerie feeling of getting through a doorway to have it slam shut behind me. Now I feel the breeze on the back of my neck as Gutenberg's era ends. I fear a Dark Age; don't forget that in late-Roman times, students began reading synopses of classic Greek works instead of tackling the original. Then and now, long, challenging work provides depth that no synopsis or web site can.
We have so much darkness in our own nation already from being led by an unread, unteachable man. What will come next?
And while YA lit and graphic novels, still thankfully popular, can convey great truths, what happens when they no longer serve as a stepping stone to Edith Wharton, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Toni Morrison? There's a straight line from the bombastic Marvel Comics of my pre-teens to the terrifying state advocated by Socrates in Plato's Republic, which I'm finally reading now in a lovely edition. Socrates, who mistrusted writing, would not have approved. I should have memorized the dialogue!
I plan to treasure the book and its lessons, even if no one I know can discuss it with me. So I went to ChatGPT. I have not touched an AI model since Fall 2025, when I last taught my adult-ed class "Writing With and About AI."
Me: Hello after a while. I've a specific question. Do you think that Socrates really hoped that the Greeks of his time would build a society like that in Plato's Republic? Keep your reply under 200 words.
Chat: Good to see you again.
Probably not—at least not in a straightforward political sense. Socrates, as Plato presents him, insists that the Republic is an inquiry into justice in the soul as much as in the city. The ideal polis functions as a magnified image of the just individual.
That said, Socrates does not dismiss political reform. He famously says that cities will have no respite until philosophers rule or rulers genuinely become philosophers. This sounds like a genuine, if remote, aspiration. Yet the proposal is framed as so demanding that many readers think Plato intended it as a regulative ideal rather than a practical blueprint for fourth-century Greece.
My view is that Socrates hoped less for Athens to become the Republic than for his interlocutors to rethink what political excellence requires. The ideal city exposes the defects of existing regimes and educates philosophical judgment. Whether anyone could actually found such a city is almost beside the point.
We get here an answer that sounds less canned than those of models a year ago. I like that "my view" moment, too. There's a hook at the end, too. We could (and I may) go on about why making an ideal city-state is "beside the point."
AIs may hallucinate, but at least they did have the Plato fed to them. They'd out-debate any of my students in a Socratic dialogue.
Image Source: Gutenberg Bible, Wikipedia
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