AI Book Club picks "The New Dark Ages": AI accelerates the post-literate society
LuizaJarovsky · x · 2026-11-06
Luiza Jarovsky's AI Book Club recommends James Marriott's "The New Dark Ages." The book argues that as print dies and literacy stagnates in developed countries, the world risks sliding back toward pre-literacy chaos and tribalism — the Enlightenment and scientific progress were products of reading culture, not natural outcomes. AI didn't start this shift but accelerates it: people outsource thinking to automated decisions and bullet-point summaries, becoming passive observers of agentic systems. Jarovsky adds that machines are human-made technocratic systems, and no one yet knows what happens when most institutions surrender to them.
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