Considering the amount of digitalization in society, more government regulations, etc. I think basic literacy alone does not guarantee you can participate in society effectively.
But in the past, literacy was typically defined as "bare minimum".
It's fine if we want to change it to "sufficiently master language to do a white collar job", but if the standard changes we shouldn't be surprised fewer people meet it.
Well the topic of conversation was AGI. I have a stem phd and I like to think I’m a strong reader, but Gemini pro can analyze/distill pages of text at least as well as I can, and much much faster. It only seems to fail when it doesn’t have relevant data/context.
It's fine if we want to change it to "sufficiently master language to do a white collar job", but if the standard changes we shouldn't be surprised fewer people meet it.