On my second reading of the essay “A Linkless Web,” I remember the first book I ever read, and wonder if an AI-generated summary would’ve robbed me of that experience.

When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened | Aeon Essays:

In The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), he argued that a reader could not sum up a poem by paraphrasing what it ‘says’. Poetry does not work like ordinary language. It is not reducible to its propositional content.

I’ll have to read this essay multiple times. It’s dense, and I suspect I’ll take away something new to dissect with each reading. I’m happy to do it.

For my second reading, my takeaway is the reading itself.

During summer break one year, I resisted the assignment of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I would’ve much rather played around the courtyard in the back of our apartment. My mother encouraged me, inscribing the first page with a message to get lost in my imagination (or something like that). I wasn’t completely convinced, but reading my mother’s warm plea was enough for me to turn to the next page—and that page was enough for the next.

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was the first novel I ever read, and it happened fast—two or three days from cover to cover. An astonishing feat for a kid with undiagnosed ADHD. That book helped me love reading and writing. My mother handing it to me on a warm summer day is a core childhood memory.

If I had AI at my fingertips, would I have ever told my mom about my homework assignment? Would I have ever read my first novel that summer? Or, with the excitement of ten-hour playtimes bouncing in my head, would I have simply asked ChatGPT for a summary the night before school?

I’m not so old that I can’t appreciate a new medium for creativity and imagination. I don’t believe artificial intelligence to be inherently evil. But in the hands of Bezos? The man who all but destroyed the book market? Or, Zuckerberg, whose only crusade is increasing his time-on-site metric? Yeah, that worries me.

So, my question is, how important was that childhood experience for me? How important will it be for my future kids?