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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

In 1800 out of a population of a billion people about 12% could read https://ourworldindata.org/literacy

That is a pool of 120 million readers to produce the tiny fraction that would produce works worth being broadly read. Its even entirely likely that many lacked the resources to become prolific skilled writers read by others even if they had the talent there being a significant barrier to entry in those days.

Now we have a population of 7.6 billion of which 85% can read. This is a population of almost 6.5 billion readers.

If people are 1/10th as likely to produce good works then we are apt to have 5 times the number of good writers.

For there to be half as many good writers we have to believe that multimedia has extinguished 99% of the inclination to write.

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I think you're right...but knowing what glory hounds most writers are, it's possible we're overlooking an important factor: the motivating aim of the authors.

In 1800, say in England, there were probably some thousands of people whose opinion an author really cared about. Now authors measure success in much higher numbers. If, and it is a big If, the cultural significance of fiction erodes then it won't matter how many people can read words off a page. Most writers want the greatest audience that they can reach and they want to give them a meaningful experience.

I have a thing in mind for a while now. We all want to make everything better, everything equal etc etc. But I so often saw a mean-levelling effect so that yes, more people are X' but X' is now 50% of what X was when only a few people were X.

Everybody is able to, and not more people want to.

More and more I think we need space, differences, voids to create attraction poles so that those who really deeply wants to be musician, moviemaker, writer, will get there and it will be meaningful.

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

Eh, I can read significantly faster than I can listen. And listening is far more annoying.

Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not Open" for illiterates?

I would rather read news on web sites than listen to TV news channels. But that is probably not the average case.

There are standard pictographs for "fire exit" and "do not open door" that are used where not everyone reads the same language.

You know those long treadmills at airports that you walk on to move faster through the concourse? They have speakers at either end constantly repeating a warning that the end is coming and to watch your step.

The written word is still optimal for education and we will continue to teach it.

Even it it were feasible to get by without reading it would take 50 years for this change to happen and in between a and b the groups that allowed this would be out competed for resources by those less stupid.

You could argue an analogy to infection can be useful: it is not only, or not so much the number of viruses / books produced, but also the contagion probability. Factors that harm infection, such as distance to the target (which, with more offer and tastes, increases); or competing hobbies (which harm time for reading and writing / virus life); or competing conversation topics (habitat competitors,vaccines, eliminated contagion vectors through hygiene)... They all can harm literature even with more viruses.

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