As modern society treads through the fast-paced, persistent waves of automation and quantification, the romantic in me, while intrigued and more often than not amazed by what the latest algorithms can achieve, wishes for a breather. A collective pause. And the exploration of a question (or three): what are these AI systems ultimately for? Are they truly creating a world that we wish to live in? Further, is the direction we are headed in helpful for posterity?

At this point, I came across Carl Hendrick’s Substack post: The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading. I hadn’t thought of reading as an ethical practice per se before, and his juxtaposition of deep reading and algorithmic optimization prompted me to revisit my own relationship with written texts.

Hendrick explains how reading is indeed an ethical practice:

It is the discipline of giving sustained, generous attention to the interior life of another. To read carefully is to say: your words matter; your complexity matters; your thought, even if difficult or dissonant, matters. It is to suspend our impulse to reply, to judge, to scroll away. And in that suspension, something else arises: empathy, reflection, even transformation.

and that as a result:

The boundaries of [his] moral imagination were being stretched, gently but insistently, by voices far wiser and more complex than [his] own and [he] became a better person for it.

Several years ago, one of my college professors had described philosophy as “a continuous conversation.” And that’s what reading essay collections from Western and Eastern antiquity into the 1900s definitely felt like! There was a certain magic to poring over the meditations of past thinkers, tracing their reasoning through the many pages, and attempting to grasp the wisdom that they sought to impart. I wasn’t just in the seminar room reading a printed PDF document; I was making a determined foray, albeit amateur, into their minds. New spaces for conversation emerged for my classmates and myself, transcending space and time.

If I remember correctly, my high school music teacher said something similar as well–particularly about the sheet music clustered on the stands in front of us. It was up to us, the readers of inscriptions passed down through generations, to carry forth and hopefully learn from the voices, emotions, and ideas communicated on paper by those before us. There are simply no words adequate enough to express the swelling of energy our ensemble felt as we brought to life Dvořák’s New World Symphony and transported ourselves to the 1800s for all of 45 minutes. (If you haven’t listened to the fourth movement, please do.)

To read deeply is to insist that some things, wisdom, empathy, the expansion of human understanding, cannot be optimised, only experienced.

I agree. Reading with intention invites us to engage with “[s]olitude, slowness, and sustained attention.” These in turn prime us to connect across cultures and eras. A critical exercise in ethics.

With both the past and the future in mind, I sincerely hope that over the next few years, we are able to take a step back and, in the process, examine ways in which we can reconcile the new advances that AI applications offer with opportunities for stillness that allow us to be in touch with our and others’ inner selves.