Name: Will AI Make Us the Last Generation to Read and Write? | Victor Riparbelli | TED
Uploaded: 2025-03-07T09:52:54.000Z
Duration: 16 min 24 s
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To-infinitive

Transcription sponsored by RenaissanceRe Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write.

I know that sounds strange, almost unthinkable.

We use it hundreds of times every single day.

And it's growing into the fabric of our daily lives.

But today, I'm going to make the case that humanity's relentless pursuit of better ways to convey ideas and preserve knowledge doesn't end with text.

I think we're at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication.

And I think that future generations will slowly replace text with more intuitive forms of communication like audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies.

And one day, I think we'll look back at reading and writing as historical artifacts, like we do with papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs or cave paintings.

This is not a personal vendetta against text.

Some of my fondest memories is walking around to my local library back in Copenhagen, that you see behind me here, picking out all kinds of books, mostly science fiction books, returning home to read them, so I could go back there again and pick out the next set of exciting books to read.

I love disappearing into these worlds that were different than the physical world around me.

And that, of course, only was amplified when I discovered the Internet at around 10 years old, which opened up an entirely new world of ideas, of music, and people.

The Internet information was free, and I saw firsthand how technology didn't just change the distribution of content, it changed the content in itself.

The difference between a lively forum and a book is massive, right?

In music, which is my big passion outside of work, I saw how software instruments and sampling and drum machines gave birth to entirely new genres that had never been possible before.

Not only that, but all the people around the world making new, exciting music could share it with the world without the middlemen of labels.

The video games I played got connected to the Internet.

You formed communities with people around the world that you didn't know.

That's what my parents thought, at least.

I started my first business when I was 13 years old in World of Warcraft.

We were 50 people slaying dragons together online.

And I would later learn in life that it's actually not that different than running a startup.

And those early years of my life sparked a lifelong interest in media and technology, how they change the way that we create, consume, play, and communicate.

And in 2016, I discovered a research paper called Face to Face by Professor Matthias Niesner and his team.

They built a system that using neural networks could produce really, really photorealistic video.

And when I saw this for the first time, I felt like I'd seen magic.

And I was convinced that in 10 years, you're going to be able to create a Hollywood film from your bedroom without needing anything else than just your imagination.

That's in three years, and I think that's actually going to hold up.

I couldn't get this idea out of my mind, and eventually I ended up founding Synthesia, an AI video company, along with Matthias and Lourdes and Stefan, my co-founders.

And this really was a way to kind of marry my interest in media and technology and sci-fi.

We started the company with the vision of making everyone in the world into a Hollywood director.

And while that's definitely still a very exciting vision, as the years kind of went on, we realized that as exciting as AI-generated Hollywood films is, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

The really exciting potential about these technologies is that they're going to enable every single piece of content from text messages to novels to boring corporate training materials to be brought alive in video and audio.

But before we talk more about video, let's talk about text.

Text is the original way of compression for human communication.

We encode our thoughts and knowledge into symbols that can convey meaning across time and space.

Thousands of years ago, text didn't exist, and the only way we had to share information was orally.

In 1500 before Christ, the first alphabet was invented, and it essentially took these very complex writing systems and simplified them into just a few characters laying the groundwork for the modern society that we know today.

In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and for the first time in history, we could mass-produce written content.

It would take until the mid-20th century before reading became something for the masses and people slowly became literate.

If we fast-forward to today, text is ubiquitous, and it's impossible to live a life without being able to read and write.

But as great as text is, it's an imperfect technology.

It's very efficient, and it's very scalable.

But it's a very, very lossy method of compressing information.

It lacks all the nuance and additional information that we get when we speak to someone in real life.

Your tone of voice, your body language, where you are, all those things matter for that message, right?

Text can be interpreted a million different ways depending on the receiver.

But we invented emojis to make it a little bit better.

People are still debating if this smiley is happy, is it pissed, is it planning to kill you, the debate goes on.

And if you think about visual communication, this is an image.

It took all of you a few seconds to look at this image and understand it, right?

It's a very intuitive way of consuming information.

What if I shared this with you instead, a text description of the image?

Would it have taken you 30 seconds to read it?

The high cognitive load to take those pieces of symbols and turn them into an image in your mind, right?

And even if I gave you 30 pages of description, you would always imagine a different image than what you are seeing behind me right now.

Once we add a time dimension, as in video, this problem massively compounds.

So it's not that strange that since the invention of text, we've been innovating towards richer and more intuitive ways of exchanging information.

We invented radio, TV, internet, VR, social media, and now AI.

In 2024, it's very obvious that people want to watch and listen.

If you look at the digital economy, TikTok is the fastest-growing social network.

It's also the fastest-growing search engine, which is very interesting.

Video and audio is everywhere in the apps that we use.

And my thesis is that the more we consume video, the more bored we are by text.

And I have to say, this is also true for me, even though I love reading.

When I want to learn something new, I usually start on YouTube, on TikTok, listen to a podcast.

And only if I'm really, really invested in something, I'll take the hours out of my day to read a 200-page book.

It just doesn't feel that much like it's worth it anymore.

And for a lot of you, you probably feel the same.

Do you want to learn music theory from a long book or from a video on YouTube that has audio?

Do you want to listen to the news on a podcast on the way to work or fold out this physical piece of paper somewhere?

I feel guilty when I watch videos and when I listen to podcasts instead of picking up a good old-fashioned book.

When you hear the commentary on this, young people are unable to focus anymore.

They need constant dopamine hits from cheap content that they scroll through on their social media apps.

They don't get outside their room anymore.

Exactly the same thing parents have been saying for 200 years.

What if we're all just tired of overly dense, slow information?

What if we become much more sensitive to the quality and the conciseness of the content that we consume because we now have infinite choice?

What if the current generation of kids are able to learn and absorb information much faster because of technology, not despite it?

Is the problem us, or is the problem text?

We just read from many different sources every single day, not just a book and a newspaper.

We read our messaging apps and our social media networks and our blog.