The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over. It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones; perhaps, if A.I.-assisted reading proves useful enough, those terms won’t necessarily apply. Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas. A piece of writing, which today is often seen as an end point, a culmination, a finished unit of effort, may, for better and worse, be experienced as a stepping stone to something else. ♦

-Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker