On Meaning, Endurance, and the Temptation of Early AI Assisted Resolution

 

Ottoman manuscript document, 18th–19th century. Photograph by the author. Collection of the Historical Museum of Crete, Heraklion.

On Meaning, Endurance, and the Temptation of Early AI Assisted Resolution

I recently read Sam Kriss’s essay, Reading is magic: What will happen in our second peasanthood, and it has stayed with me. Not because of its argument alone, but because it names a real unease: that something which once required time, friction, and endurance to become real in a person no longer seems to require them.

To see this clearly, it helps to begin somewhere older than literacy itself. For most of human history, religious belief did not depend on reading. It was carried. It was given, received, repeated, feared, trusted, doubted, and returned to. It was spoken in words not always fully understood, enacted in gestures that preceded explanation, and held in lives that did not need to justify it in order to live by it. Yet it bore some of the heaviest materials a human life must contend with: suffering, guilt, forgiveness, sacrifice, death, hope.

Ritual, repetition, waiting, doubt, and the return to the same words and gestures were among the means by which meaning took hold. It was not something one could articulate and then leave behind. It had to settle slowly into a person, often painfully and without clarity. One did not immediately understand what one was saying or doing. One grew into it, or resisted it, but either way it demanded something. That demand gave meaning its weight.

None of the fundamentals of human life has changed. Bodies still age. Loss still arrives. Relationships still ask for nuance, complexity, and care. People still think, feel, suffer, hope, hesitate, and return. What has changed is the relation between language and experience.

Words now travel quickly. The realities they refer to, grief, responsibility, belief, doubt, still move slowly. A gap opens between the pace at which things can be said and the pace at which they become real in a life. On one side is a human existence that remains difficult, unresolved, and resistant to quick clarity. On the other is a stream of language that is immediate, ready-made, and frictionless.

AI sharpens this shift. With AI assistance, understanding and articulation begin to separate. One can generate a fluent account of grief, love, responsibility, belief, or doubt without having remained inside them long enough to be changed by them. Language creates the sense of resolution, but often resolves only the unease of not yet knowing. The sentence is complete. The person is not.

It becomes possible to name something before one has entered it, to explain it before one has endured its confusion, to adopt the language of insight before insight has taken shape. The easier road is not merely quicker expression, but premature closure. One reaches for the formulation that relieves tension, and in doing so steps out of the harder work of remaining inside what has not yet yielded its meaning.

This is not a moral failure. It is a change in conditions. Research on reading and cognition has long suggested that sustained engagement with language shapes how thought forms over time. Luria treated literacy and schooling not simply as means of storing information, but as forces that reshape how people handle categories and hypothetical reasoning. Maryanne Wolf has argued that deep reading is a cultivated cognitive achievement tied to reflection and critical thought. Studies comparing reading on paper and on screens have found measurable differences in comprehension. Educational data now show declines in reading performance among children in the United States, with NAEP reporting that only 31% of fourth-grade students performed at or above Proficient in reading in 2024, down from 2022 and 2019.

The gender dimension gives this more social and political weight. Across OECD education systems, girls outperformed boys in reading in 79 of 81 participating systems in PISA 2022. That gap does not by itself explain the later divergence between young men and women, but it helps give it substance. The difference is not only in political opinion. It appears earlier, in habits of reading, educational performance, and the environments through which language is encountered and practised.

By early adulthood, those differences are showing up more clearly in political culture. Gallup reported in 2024 that young women in the United States were substantially more likely than young men to identify as liberal, and comparative research published in European Sociological Review found that a modern youth gender gap in political ideology has emerged or widened in a number of countries, with young women tending more leftward than young men in several cases. These patterns are not reducible to reading scores, but they are consistent with the possibility that young men and young women are increasingly inhabiting different moral and cognitive environments.

Once language becomes easier to produce than the experience required to ground it, several distinctions begin to blur. It becomes harder to tell the difference between something one has lived and something one has merely learned to say. Harder to hold a thought long enough for it to change one’s inner shape. Harder to stay with a question that refuses resolution. Harder to bear something that cannot be expressed cleanly.

The cost is not only intellectual. It alters disposition. It weakens patience with ambiguity, reduces tolerance for what is unfinished, and erodes the capacity to remain inside experience without immediately converting it into language.

Religious belief once demanded repetition, patience, endurance. Literacy, in its own way, demanded attention, sequence, return. Both required that a person remain with something long enough for it to become real. What is changing now is not simply what we read, but whether meaning still has to pass through that process at all.

The political implications follow from this. Democratic life depends not only on having views, but on the capacity to stay with competing claims, weigh them, test them, and revise them. If language increasingly offers the feeling of understanding before understanding has been earned, then politics becomes more vulnerable to repetition, tone, and alignment, and less dependent on reasoning that can be sustained under pressure. The result is not necessarily ignorance. It is brittleness. A public culture in which expression is abundant, but fewer positions have been inwardly formed enough to bear strain.

This also connects to a question I raised in my Academia.edu paper, THE FUTURE: A CHARTER FOR ETHICAL AND VISIONARY AI DESIGN: whether systems should privilege truth, verification, and intellectual honesty over fluency and convenience. My paper presents those principles explicitly, including “Truth Before Utility” and “Human Self-Realisation as Sacred.” That concern belongs here, because language systems do not simply assist expression. They make it easier to appear resolved before one is resolved, and to speak before one has undergone the labour of knowing.

The result is not silence. It is a culture in which more and more can be said while less and less has been borne. Words begin to detach from the time, contradiction, and patience through which they once acquired density. Meaning does not disappear. It loses weight. It becomes easier to circulate, easier to adopt, and easier to abandon.

And once meaning no longer needs to be borne, it becomes difficult to say what it means at all.