The Dawn of the Postliterate Age, page 3
Google, AI, and Instantaneous Information

The advent of faster and more dexterous artificial intelligence systems could further erode traditional literacy. Take, for example, one of the most famous AI systems, the Google search engine. According to Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, the company is turning “search” (the act of 220;search” (the act of googling) into a conversational interface. In an interview with Venture Beat, Norvig noted that “Google has several teams focused on natural language and dozens of Googlers with a PhD in the field, including myself.”

AI watchers predict that natural-language search will replace what some call “keywordese” in five years. Once search evolves from an awkward word hunt — guessing at the key words that might be in the document you’re looking for — to a “conversation” with an AI entity, the next logical step is vocal conversation with your computer. Ask a question and get an answer. No reading necessary.

Barney Pell, whose company Powerset was also working on a conversational-search interface before it was acquired by Microsoft, dismissed the notion that a computerized entity could effectively fill the role of text, but he does acknowledge that breakthroughs of all sorts are possible.

“The problem with storing raw sounds is that it’s a sequential access medium; you have to listen to it. You can’t do other things in parallel,” said Pell during our 2007 discussion. “But if you have a breakthrough where auditory or visual information could connect to a human brain in a way that bypasses the processes of decoding the written text, where you can go as fast and slow as you want and have all the properties that textual written media supports, then I could believe that text could be replaced.”

The likelihood of that scenario depends on whom you ask, but if technological progress in computation is any indication, we are safe in assuming that an artificial intelligence entity will eventually emerge that allows individuals to process information as quickly or as slowly as reading written language.

Will “HAL” Make Us Stupid?

How can the written word — literary culture — survive the advent of the talking, all-knowing, handheld PC? How does one preserve a culture built on a 6,000-year-old technology in the face of super-computation? According to many of the researchers who are designing the twenty-first century’s AI systems, the answer is, you don’t. You submit to the inexorable march of progress and celebrate the demise of the written word as an important step forward in human evolution.

When confronted by the statistic that fewer than 50% of high-school seniors could differentiate between an objective Web site and a biased source, Norvig replied that he did perceive it as a problem, and astonishingly suggested that the solution was to get rid of reading instruction altogether.

“We’re used to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school,” Norvig told me. “Some of it could be just-in-time. Education, search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.”

Norvig is not an enemy of written language; he’s even contributed several pieces to the McSweeny’s Web site, a favorite among bibliophiles. He’s not a starry-eyed technologist harboring unrealistic views of technology’s potential. Still, this cavalierly stated proposal that we might simply drop the teaching of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” in favor of search-engine-based education speaks volumes about what little regard some of the world’s top technologists hold for our Victorian education system and its artifacts, like literary culture.

In the coming decades, lovers of the written word may find themselves ill-equipped to defend the seemingly self-evident merits of text to a technology-oriented generation who prefer instantaneous data to hard-won knowledge. Arguing the artistic merits of Jamesian prose to a generation who, in coming years, will rely on conversational search to find answers to any question will likely prove a frustrating, possibly humiliating endeavor.

If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively. But it’s up to us, as the consumers and producers of technology, to insist that the would-be replacement demonstrate authentic superiority. It’s not enough for new devices, systems, and gizmos to simply be more expedient than what they are replacing — as the Gatling gun was over the rifle — or more marketable — as unfiltered cigarettes were over pipe tobacco. We owe it to posterity to demand proof that people’s communications will be more intelligent, persuasive, and constructive when they occur over digital media, and proof that digital media, and proof that illiteracy, even in an age of great technological capability, will improve people’s lives.

As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young people will do what countless generations before them have done: defy authority.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.
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