Will My Kid Be the Last Generation to Read and Write?

Will my kid, or perhaps my grandkid, be the last generation to read and write? Humanity has been on a relentless pursuit of ways to preserve and transmit knowledge, and text — despite its relatively recent emergence in the grand evolution of Homo sapiens — has proven to be the most efficient and scalable method of communication. Even to this day, it remains unparalleled in terms of storage efficiency and information retrieval.

A book-sized text file can be shared almost instantly over the internet, even on slow connections, whereas video requires high bandwidth and significant processing power to encode, decode, and stream, making it economically costly. In fact, we may often extract more information from text than from video. Because of this underlying economic incentive, only content, ideas, and knowledge deemed important and popular enough get converted into audio or video. Otherwise, they remain in text because it is the most cost-effective medium. That is why we have Marvel movies but not high-production video content explaining the family, genus, and species of the platypus.

However, this could drastically change in the future. Advances in AI, compression algorithms, network technologies, and digital infrastructure have significantly reduced the cost of video content creation, storage, and transmission. In other words, we might soon find ourselves surrounded by an abundance of video content — not just viral TikTok clips, but detailed visual explanations of everything ever documented about the platypus. We've already seen rapid advancements in AI-generated video, enabling almost anyone to create content from just their imagination and descriptions.

But is this transformation truly a good thing? In some ways, it is beneficial. Even though text is ubiquitous today and covers almost every aspect of our past, present, and future, something is still lost in the process. Context, situational cues, tone, facial expressions — these are all absent in written text. Without these components, we can never fully relate to or understand the message in its entirety. So perhaps new methods of preserving information — through audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies — could provide us with a clearer window into both the events themselves and the context behind them.

And don't get me wrong, I love to read and write. For some reason, I psychologically attribute more value to books. I see them as superior, and at times I feel guilty watching a YouTube video rather than reading classic literature, even when the video is educational. What worries me even more is that the more video I consume, the more I find myself disengaged with text. I planned to read Playground by Richard Powers, yet I now require more willingness and determination than my childhood self ever needed to sit down, read, and immerse myself in the story. That is a terrifying realization, and I believe many others can relate.

So how did I approach this? I think maybe I should stop viewing books as inherently superior, as if reading them automatically makes me more knowledgeable or thoughtful. Texts and sentences can indeed be beautiful, much like an artifact or a piece of art. But more importantly, beyond the little symbols on each page, is how they inspire me to think critically. The word "critically" here is what I believe matters the most. Without critical thinking, reading as an action is not what I seek. I want my mind to be exposed and challenged by these symbols, allowing my thoughts to be educated, reshaped, or further validated by what I read.

That is something books provide — something that is rarely present in the current landscape of social video content. However, this may not hold true in the future. If other forms of content can inspire us in the same way that text does, or even more profoundly, then perhaps this shift is not as bad as we fear. Ultimately, it is the ability to think critically that ought to be preserved in this ever-changing era.