Reading in the age of AI

The point of reading a book is not extracting information but having a conversation with the author and thinking about what the author is proposing. Paraphrasing David Kadavy, it’s about answering the questions you had in mind when you opened the book. Ezra Klein, quoted in Brain Food (Farnam Street’s newsletter): Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you. Sometimes I share an idea or a quote from a book with friends. My intention is to start a conversation. What’s happening lately, however, is that sometimes, someone replies with an AI-generated summary of the…