Abstract:
How fundamental is reading to us, both literary fiction and nonfiction, and what impact might AI and digital technologies be
having on the act of reading, and, by default, on us and our
brains? This is what this talk will be about. We will start by
looking at where and when and how reading began. Thereafter,
we will consider where reading is now, anno 2023, between
paper and pixels. We will then start to speculate how reading
might evolve in the next 100 years under the influence of digital
technologies. Finally, we will consider what effects such an
evolution might have on text comprehension, human memory,
and human emotion, and whether this might pose challenges
for the future. We also consider what role oral storytelling and
the power of rhetoric might start to play again across the globe
in the matrix of human society and AI/human communication.
