The Death of Reading: An AI-Era Paradox
14 October 2026
I came across a thought-provoking video titled The Death of Reading.
Look around the next time you are on a flight, in a train, or even sitting in a waiting room. You’ll find almost no one reading books, but the overwhelming majority are glued to their screens.
And this behaviour extends well beyond travel. Somewhere along the way, reading seems to have taken a back seat.
The video shared some interesting observations that made me think. A 20-year study of over 236,000 Americans found that the proportion reading for pleasure fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.
And it makes this important distinction:
“We have become very good at consuming information but really bad at sitting with it.”
We may be reading more words than ever, but increasingly in fragments: headlines, captions, messages and posts.
We increasingly use AI to summarise books. A summary may give you the key ideas in a few seconds, but it cannot fully replace the experience of reading, questioning, connecting ideas and forming your own interpretation.
Reading isn’t just about what you learn. It’s about what happens in our minds as we question, connect ideas, disagree and form our own interpretations.
The AI-era paradox
And here’s the paradox to think about.
As AI changes the nature of work, we are increasingly expected to exercise judgment, question assumptions and critically evaluate AI-generated output.
And what’s the most fundamental thing you need to do before you can evaluate an AI-generated response?
Read it. Carefully.
Not skim it, not accept it at face value, but actually understand what it says and what it might be missing.
I believe the ability to read deeply and critically will become even more important in the AI era, just when our habits seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
We may be losing the very skill we will need more of.
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