M.

Modern life demands a lot of tedious writing. Some of it can surely be offloaded to machines without too great a cost. But a career spent studying the historical adoption of new technologies has convinced Newport that it’s almost impossible to automate away one problem without creating others. Over and over, people think they’re using a tool to bypass a single tiresome task. “And then there’s all these unexpected second-order impacts,” he told me. Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life. The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence. AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode. What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.”

Being able to change the world, act effectively in the world, relies on your mental model of the world—and of yourself. Those models can be significantly affected by the works of imagination you read, watch, and listen to. Those works give you new models all the time, new ways of connecting the inner and the outer life, new explanations for why people are the way they are, and new maps for the journey you might take. Imagination is essential to our notions of identity, language, and thought. That is part of Locke’s revolution in 1690. And those ideas gave the novelists their starting point.

“I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly.”

Hearing a book takes away the friction of visually decoding and processing. While listening, you are going at the narrative pace of the author. Some may claim they stop and take notes, but this isn’t the default behavior the medium encourages. There’s a reason the author wrote the book rather than merely narrating it and releasing it only on audio. Friction is the point of reading. There is no difficulty without friction, making the argument absurd on its face if one considers what ‘difficult’ might mean.

Our insistence on collapsing the distinction between the two is a tendency evident in many areas: we want the identity of being a disciplined person without the effort to cultivate it. I hosted a discussion on Brave New World a few weeks ago, and the idea of doing hard things came up because the World State is one in which people are conditioned against difficulty. The removal of friction is the point, because it makes the population easy to control. The people in the room were clearly aware that they weren’t doing hard things, and that a good life requires doing something difficult even if you’re not world-renowned at it. The good life requires working toward mastery of something, whether in your professional life or in some other craft. You need to introduce meaningful friction into the process.

The fact that the burden of proof is on me to prove that hearing and reading are distinct, rather than on those who are collapsing the distinction between the two, says something. We treat effort hierarchies as illegitimate unless they can be empirically proven beyond doubt (do you have a study for that?). We punish those who put in more effort by calling them elitist or ableist (two charges I am sure to receive). I have to downplay the fact that I read many difficult texts because it’s considered haughty to insist that hearing and reading aren’t the same. I’m creating a hierarchy of effort, which the professional class generally doesn’t like. They are confronted by the fact that they’re not doing the thing they claim to be doing. The social signals are all scrambled: you can signal seriousness by putting in less effort. So why would anyone put in more effort privately if the payoff is the same? And the payoff is identical because we have made it socially acceptable to collapse the distinction between listening and reading, or generally between two activities requiring differential effort.