What Happens to a Technologically Advanced Society that Becomes Functionally Illiterate?

I read an article the other day (I can’t remember where) about how some schools are graduating people who are functionally illiterate. There have been other articles about how professors are seeing students in their calculus class who can’t do basic fractions (this was at a major school, not a community college), and I’ve seen a video where high school students couldn’t read a basic sentence with slightly advanced vocabulary.

Artificial intelligence is making it so that fewer people need to have real intelligence. You can just get AI to read a passage to you, or do your work. I read an article about how some people are using AI to train AI chatbots (yeah, that will not work out well).

So last night I was thinking… what happens to a technologically advanced society like the United States when it becomes functionally illiterate? Some say that AI will eventually become so smart that it will be able to maintain itself. I doubt it.

I’m going to operate on the assumption that AI will eventually need maintenance, like everything else. So what happens? History often rhymes, and we have seen this before, with the collapse of the Roman Empire. It probably also occurred during the Late Bronze Age collapse, but I know a lot less about that.

Everything might seem normal now, but perhaps we are in the first stages of collapse (I hope we aren’t). Things could turn around. Perhaps we’ll find some way to improve our educational system. Perhaps people will see that AI can’t replace real learning. But perhaps not. The ancient Romans couldn’t really see their fall at the time, but in hindsight, it was completely real (1).

Rome once had a society that was very advanced technologically. Some of their roads have lasted over 1000 years. They had heated floors in some places. When the History Channel actually had history on it, there were several shows about ancient engineering and the marvels at the time. Some of the technology they had at the time was so advanced, it took about 1500 years for us to figure out how to replicate it.

The Roman Empire faced different, but perhaps similar, problems to what we face today. Their borders were increasingly becoming more porous. People with wealth increasingly saw themselves as above the law. Some large landowners (land was wealth in those days) would increasingly ignore the emperors’ decrees. In some cases, they would even use Roman buildings as quarries for their private palaces! (2)

But relating most closely to our world today, knowledge and learning is decreasing. In Rome, after the sack of Rome, knowledge decreased. The world was increasingly falling into chaos, and “a world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained.” (3) Perhaps we are facing the same kind of situation. Young people are finding it increasingly difficult to launch out on their own. Life is becoming more expensive (yes, I know the arguments about cell phones and luxuries, but the necessities, like property, are becoming increasingly out of reach for many). When one is having difficulty coping, whether due to finances or mental health struggles, they’re probably not rushing home to read a good book or learn something.

Something I find interesting is that in the Roman empire’s later years, the definition of what it meant to be civilized changed. To be civilized meant that you were “doing well what has been done before.” (4) Isn’t that primarily what generative AI is doing? Generative AI uses the inputs it has been trained on, repackages it, and comes up with something new. But is it really new and innovative? AI is not alive. It doesn’t know what it feels like to have its heart broken, or to come home to find your house has caught on fire.

In the last days of the Roman empire, infrastructure started to fail. Aqueducts that once were maintained no longer were. Where once there was a literate civilization (the early Christians wrote plenty of letters back and forth), we entered a period of history that was once known as the Dark Ages. Historians don’t like that term anymore, but that term was not invented because it was a barbaric time; it was coined because there were so few records of what happened that still survived.

Our society needs education. We need people that can read and do math. I do believe AI is a tool and has its uses, but it can’t be used to replace original thought. It can’t be used to replace learning for oneself. If not, the people that come after us may find themselves losing the comforts of society that we now take for granted.

(1) Thomas Cahill. How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. Audiobook edition. ~minute 26.

(2) Ibid., ~hour 1 minute 12.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid., ~minute 44.