alt Hacker NewsWith 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.
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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.
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.
>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.