[Merrill]

With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.

What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.

[coldtea]

>With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population.

That's Idiocracy at play.

[gizajob]

With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.

[coldtea]

Bold of you to assume they'd still need to do actual living. Why not immediately die, and be spared all the extra effort?

[netsharc]

For their votes, of course.

Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!"..

Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..

[coldtea]

Well, they'll make sure they don't need votes soon enough...

[KellyCriterion]

Movie: Wall-E -> showing what you are saying :-D

[gizajob]

Yeah the present has turned into a mashup of Wall-E, Idiocracy, Inifnite Jest, Back to the Future 2 with some ideas from Neal Stephenson borrowed by the tech bros who think they’re cultured.

[hedora]

The difference between fifth and sixth grade reading levels doesn’t have much to do with sounding out words.

Reading text aloud to the illiterate group is not sufficient to let them understand the material.

Arguably, an LLM could rewrite the content to target illiterate audiences.

chatgpt 4o mini did better with your comment than I’d guessed it would:

> With new tools that change speech to text and text to speech, many people might not need to read or write as much. If someone has to make an important paper, like a contract or a will, they will probably ask someone who knows how to do that.

> It's not clear if people who work in STEM (like science and math) can skip reading and writing. In STEM, they use many pictures, charts, and drawings to share ideas. While these don’t always use words, they often have things like math symbols or simple sentences to help explain.

I feel the sentence structures it chose are a bit too complicated for K-3rd grade level, which is what it should have targeted. Maybe some prompt engineering could get it to simplify further.

[Merrill]

Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.

I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.

Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.

[hedora]

It replaced expert with “people that know how to do that”, which probably makes sense for the target audience.

(If you’re illiterate in the US, it’s probably because of choices you made, and those choices are correlated to listening to news sources that vilify experts.)

But, yeah, it loses nuance.

Also, I’d argue that literacy is less tied to written language these days than language comprehension, and the ability to articulate yourself.

Back when books were precious those two things were highly correlated. Nowadays, not so much.

[selimthegrim]

Good rebuses are hard, it should be interesting to see whether VLMs can be trained to judge them