A dramatic decline in literacy among the young is matched by the rise of the smartphone. Are we in a post-literate society? CC-licensed photo by James West on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. Read this first. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The dawn of the post-literate society • Cultural Capital
James Marriott:
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The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.
More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.
In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty% in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
…What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.
Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.
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Important and thoughtful piece of writing. (Which I came to via a podcast. Ahem.) Rob Graham observed astutely that the reason all the claims by Trumpists that the 2020 election was “stolen” were made on video was because, aside from it being popular, it’s very difficult to spot elisions and omissions in video: it streams past. With print, you can pause, read at your own pace, reflect. We are losing something very important.
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‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? • The Guardian
Julia Carrie Wong:
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Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his “super loquacious” four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed.
“He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone,” recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. “I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off.”
But when Josh returned to the living room two hours later, he found his child still happily chatting away with ChatGPT in voice mode. “The transcript is over 10k words long,” he confessed in a sheepish Reddit post. “My son thinks ChatGPT is the coolest train loving person in the world. The bar is set so high now I am never going to be able to compete with that.”
From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere. A century ago, mothers in Arizona worried that radio programs were “overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming” for children; today’s parents self-flagellate over screen time and social media.
But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.
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Interesting piece. Though will it make the next generation literate, or self-absorbed?
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Japan is running out of its favorite beer after ransomware attack • Financial Times via Ars Technica
Harry Dempsey and Leo Lewis:
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Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries.
The vast majority of Asahi Group’s 30 factories in Japan have not operated since Monday after the attack disabled its ordering and delivery system, the company said.
Retailers are already expecting empty shelves as the outage stretches into its fourth day with no clear timeline for factories recommencing operations. Super Dry could also run out at izakaya pubs, which rely on draught and bottles.
Lawson, one of Japan’s big convenience stores, said in a statement that it stocks many Asahi Group products and “it is possible that some of these products may become increasingly out of stock from tomorrow onwards.”
“This is having an impact on everyone,” said an executive at another of Japan’s major retailers. “I think we will run out of products soon. When it comes to Super Dry, I think we’ll run out in two or three days at supermarkets and Asahi’s food products within a week or so.”
The executive said that it would look to other brands such as Suntory or Kirin to quench Japanese drinkers’ thirst but acknowledged that many customers are fiercely loyal to Super Dry’s taste.
Asahi declined to comment on any possible shortage or retailer inventories. Japan’s largest brewer produces the equivalent of 6.7m large bottles of beer per day on average in the country, based on Financial Times calculations using its 2024 sales figure.
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This means war, surely. OK, Jaguar can’t make cars, that’s tolerable, but you cut off a nation’s beer?
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The smart glasses race is really on now • The Verge
Jay Peters:
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Last month, I had a conversation with someone wearing glasses — and couldn’t see that they had a display right in front of one of their eyes. Through a monitor connected to the glasses, I watched in awe as my colleague Victoria Song scrolled through and wrote WhatsApp messages, used the display as a viewfinder for a photo, changed the volume on Spotify by turning her hand as if she was holding a knob, and even looked at directions on a map. And when I looked Victoria in the eye, while I could tell she was looking at something on the glasses, I couldn’t see the display at all.
This was my first look at the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the company’s new smart glasses with a monocular screen. It was a hugely impressive demo. And it was all happening on a pair of glasses that, while bulky, could totally pass for something a normal person would wear. Ray-Ban put its name on the glasses, after all.
As we walked away from the demo, I remember thinking that an Apple version of those glasses would be the most obvious thing in the world. Can you imagine how useful it would be to have a pair of glasses connected to your iPhone with speakers, a camera at eye level, and your own private display to show you things like notifications, music, and directions right in front of your eyes?
Apparently, somebody at Apple thinks that, too. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is pausing work on a lighter Vision Pro headset in favor of speeding up its smart glasses efforts, which include pairs with and without a display.
Even the non-display glasses seem like a slam dunk for Apple. Imagine AirPods, but sunglasses; if that was the entire product, I’d probably be first in line. Apple’s first glasses will reportedly have a camera, too, and while I’m a little more skeptical of cameras on your face, the millions of people who have already bought Ray-Ban Meta glasses prove that there’s a market for something like that, too.
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I find it utterly astonishing that Apple wasted years on the Vision Pro when smart glasses were waiting, right there, to be invented and made good. It’s been obvious for years that this is the valuable fruit. Not low-hanging, perhaps, but tantalising and so, so tastily lucrative.
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Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society and sports • Pew Research Center
John Gramlich:
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Public awareness of legal sports betting has grown in recent years – and so has the perception that it is a bad thing for society and sports, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That’s up from 34% in 2022. And 40% of adults now say it’s a bad thing for sports, up from 33%.
Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who have bet money on sports in the past year has not changed much since 2022. Today, 22% of adults say they’ve personally bet money on sports in the past year. That’s a slight uptick from 19% three years ago. This figure includes betting in any of three ways:
• With friends or family, such as in a private betting pool, fantasy league or casual bet
• Online with a betting app, sportsbook or casino
• In person at a casino, racetrack or betting kioskAll of this increase has come through online sports betting: 10% of adults now say they’ve placed a bet this way in the past year, up from 6% in 2022. There has been no change in the shares of adults who have bet on sports with family or friends or in person at a casino, racetrack or betting kiosk.
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Commercial sports betting only became legal throughout the US in 2018, so this is a pretty rapid takeoff for resistance to it. The problem, as I see it, is that the power imbalance is so stark between bettors and the betting companies. The latter are always rich; the former do not win, on the whole. So betting between individuals? Fine. (Though of course this opens the door to the Mafia; but they can’t be on the internet in the same way.) In person at a casino or racetrack? Also fine. But online? That’s the problem.
And as I wrote a few weeks ago, it creates problems for the players of the sports too.
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China’s EV battery giants outpace South Korea’s struggling rivals • Rest of World
Ananya Bhattacharya:
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China’s battery giants have pulled the plug on South Korea’s dominance in powering electric vehicles.
South Korea’s three top EV battery makers — LG Energy Solution, SK On, and Samsung SDI — are operating their factories at half capacity, while Chinese rivals CATL and BYDi
run theirs near full throttle. The global battery industry has fundamentally realigned from premium performance to cost-effectiveness.
While South Korean manufacturers built their business on nickel-based batteries with superior energy density, Chinese companies dominate production of cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries that automakers now prefer.
“When automakers accept LFP for high volumes, demand for premium nickel cells becomes a niche market serving luxury, long-range, and performance vehicles,” Oliver Petschenyk, powertrain analyst at research firm GlobalData, told Rest of World. “This shrinks the volume addressable for South Korean players built around that chemistry.”
LG Energy Solution’s factory use has fallen for four straight years while China’s CATL operates at 90% capacity, according to SNE Research. The three South Korean giants’ combined share outside China dropped to 38% this year, down seven percentage points from 2024.
The battery wars that reshaped the industry began in 2021 when Chinese companies massively increased production of nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries. The surge drove up prices for lithium, nickel, and cobalt, widening the cost differential between NMC and LFP battery packs and triggering a market shift that South Korean firms failed to anticipate.
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When it comes to important technologies, China has been farsighted and determined about getting its companies into pole positions.
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Judge signals Meta may owe $8bn in menstrual app privacy suit • Courthouse News Service
Margaret Attridge:
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A federal judge Tuesday indicated that Meta may have to pay nearly $8bn to users of the period tracking app Flo who had their information illegally recorded by Meta.
In August, a jury found that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act when it intentionally recorded the sensitive health information of millions of women through Flo following a two-week trial this summer.
The plaintiffs proposed damages of $5,000 per class member — the amount of statutory damages allowed per violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act.
Michael P. Canty of New York-based Labaton Keller Sucharow, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said they don’t know the exact size of the class but estimate around 1.6 million eligible class members in California.
US District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, did not object to the proposed damages amount and stated that he was aware of, but not concerned about, the potential for fraud given the high damages amount.
“There’s no reason that gives me undue concern that there will be rampant fraud. We are not going to let people cheat the system. I want to see as many cross-checks as we can,” he said.
The plaintiffs are proposing a streamlined claims procedure that requires class members to submit their name and contact information and attest under penalty of perjury that they lived in California and downloaded the Flo Health app between Nov. 1, 2016, and Feb 28, 2019.
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The good old days of privacy invasion just because you had access to everything on the phone may be past, but their legacy is not.
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AI wrote nearly a quarter of corporate press releases in 2024 • EurekAlert!
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Since 2022, American companies, consumers, and even the United Nations have used large language models—artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT that are trained to create text that reads like human-generated writing. In a study published October 2 in the Cell Press journal Patterns, researchers reveal that AI is used in an average of 17% of analyzed corporate and governmental written content, from job posts to press releases, and this rate will likely continue to increase.
“This is the first comprehensive review of the use of AI-assisted writing across diverse sectors of society,” says corresponding author James Zou of Stanford University. “We were able to look at the adoption patterns across a variety of stakeholders and users, and all of them showed a very consistent increasing trend in the last 2 years.”
Large language models became widely available to the public in late 2022. Today, more than a billion people around the world use them regularly.
Zou and his team decided to use an AI detection program that they’d previously developed to investigate the adoption patterns of these AI tools across four different writing contexts: US consumer complaints, company press releases, UN press releases, and job postings. They collected text published between January 2022 and September 2024 from each of these domains and ran it through the program.
To start, the team analyzed more than 687,000 complaints submitted between 2022 and 2024 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a US government agency responsible for protecting consumers from banks and other financial companies. They found that about 18% of these complaints were likely written by AI.
For the corporate news releases, the researchers analyzed text published in three major news release platforms in the US: Newswire, PRWeb, and PRNewswire. They found that since the launch of ChatGPT, nearly a quarter of releases on these sites were AI generated. In particular, science and technology releases had the highest AI use rate by the end of 2023.
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To be honest, I think this would be a welcome release for most people in PR. Writing press releases is a form of torture for them, because they know they’ll be largely ignored. This is much better. Obviously, journalists need to respond in kind by getting an AI agent to filter all the email that arrives in their inboxes.
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OpenAI hits $500bn valuation after share sale to SoftBank, others, source says • Reuters
Krystal Hu:
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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500bn, following a deal in which current and former employees sold roughly $6.6bn worth of shares, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.
This represents a bump-up from its current valuation of $300bn, underscoring OpenAI’s rapid gains in both users and revenue. Reuters reported details of the stock sale earlier in August.
As part of the deal, OpenAI employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T. Rowe Price, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The company had authorized sales of $10bn-plus worth of stock on the secondary market, the source added.
Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX and T. Rowe Price did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The share sale adds to SoftBank’s earlier investment in OpenAI’s $40bn primary funding round.
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And yet we begin to wonder if there is enough money in all the world to fund what OpenAI wants to do (make a really, really good video generator that can take over TikTok and write press releases with the other hand. Forget the artificial general intelligence stuff).
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Labour plans to consult on use of live facial recognition before wider roll-out • The Guardian
Rajeev Syal:
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Labour plans to consult on the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology before expanding it across England, the new policing minister has told the party’s annual conference.
Sarah Jones, a Home Office minister, said the government would “put some parameters” over when and where it could be used in future.
Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to self-regulate their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology’s algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said its use is unlawful and incompatible with European laws.
Speaking at a Tony Blair Institute fringe meeting in Liverpool, Jones said: “We need to put some parameters around what we can use facial recognition for. “There has been some advice on how we use it. But we need to go further to make sure it’s clear when it should be used and when it shouldn’t be used, to put some structure around it. Because there isn’t really much of a structure around what it’s used for at the moment. We need to look at whether that’s enough and whether we need to do more.”
Jones, the MP for Croydon West, said Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and a fellow Croydon MP, had supported its use after it was deployed to catch criminals in thesouth London borough. “Chris Philp is very keen on it and talks about it all the time as well. And what we have seen from Croydon is that it works.”
…Civil liberty groups have called on the Metropolitan police to drop the use of LFR cameras after a high court challenge was launched last month by Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife campaigner. Thompson, a Black British man, was wrongly identified by LFR as a criminal, held by police, and then faced demands from officers for his fingerprints.
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The EHRC opposition says LFR interferes with right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The high court challenge will probably go to the UK Supreme Court.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Oh woe unto us, did you know there is a scary technology which turns the brain to mush, and will corrupt the ability of the youth to properly learn? I mean not ChatGPT, not smartphones, but that enemy of true intelligence, the bane of philosophers, the horror of … gasp … WRITING! Take it from Socrates:
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”
However I do think Rob Graham’s point about the ability to examine the written word is important, and a crucial difference between the spoken/shown word. Reading is asynchronous: we can revisit, speed up, take it at the speed we like. (A lovely comment I saw recently was one from a primary teacher who said “the most wonderful silence you ever hear is of a child reading a sentence to themselves in their head for the first time.”)
We can’t do that, or couldn’t, with the spoken/shown word. I think there might be a case to make that writing allowed the most rapid expansion of knowledge ever. By contrast, short-form video probably puts blinkers on it.
We have no idea what Apple has been doing all these years regarding smart glasses.
Also, most of the time and resources they have “wasted” on visionOS (and some of the hardware) will surely be useful later on.
Apple is late to everything all the time. So far, none of that has mattered. They haven’t been the first to market in anything. One day it might matter, of course.
(But Apple’s glasses will never see the light of day in EU, due to regulation. To be really great, they need to be tightly integrated to Apple’s ecosystem and that’s illegal.)
We do know that the thing it hasn’t been doing with smart glasses is: releasing any. While it has done that with big heavy expensive headsets, which has gone down like a cup of cold sick. They could have spent less time on the car and more on the smart glasses. I think I would have.
Apple will release their glasses when they are ready. We simply do not know what they are working on. Not having released anything by now is not necessarily an indication of doom. Although Apple is always doomed 🙂
Only by now Meta’s tech is sort of getting there. Interesting times ahead.
(The Apple car never made any sense.)