If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it.

The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner. We scrambled through the Snow Queen incident but didn’t ever stop reading aloud. We read all the Harry Potters (yeah, yeah I know, don’t @ me – but they were great to read aloud) multiple times. If we drove somewhere, or were on holidays, one member of the family – and taking turns is important – would read. Vacation campfires were kept aflame by reading…