Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.
A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.
With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.
What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.
With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.
Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!"..
Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..
Yeah the present has turned into a mashup of Wall-E, Idiocracy, Inifnite Jest, Back to the Future 2 with some ideas from Neal Stephenson borrowed by the tech bros who think they’re cultured.
The difference between fifth and sixth grade reading levels doesn’t have much to do with sounding out words.
Reading text aloud to the illiterate group is not sufficient to let them understand the material.
Arguably, an LLM could rewrite the content to target illiterate audiences.
chatgpt 4o mini did better with your comment than I’d guessed it would:
> With new tools that change speech to text and text to speech, many people might not need to read or write as much. If someone has to make an important paper, like a contract or a will, they will probably ask someone who knows how to do that.
> It's not clear if people who work in STEM (like science and math) can skip reading and writing. In STEM, they use many pictures, charts, and drawings to share ideas. While these don’t always use words, they often have things like math symbols or simple sentences to help explain.
I feel the sentence structures it chose are a bit too complicated for K-3rd grade level, which is what it should have targeted. Maybe some prompt engineering could get it to simplify further.
Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.
I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.
Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.
It replaced expert with “people that know how to do that”, which probably makes sense for the target audience.
(If you’re illiterate in the US, it’s probably because of choices you made, and those choices are correlated to listening to news sources that vilify experts.)
But, yeah, it loses nuance.
Also, I’d argue that literacy is less tied to written language these days than language comprehension, and the ability to articulate yourself.
Back when books were precious those two things were highly correlated. Nowadays, not so much.
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
While what you say is true, starch is still nutritionally unnecessary. And wheat in particular has a lot of unhealthy or even outright toxic substances in it, especially if you are talking about the whole wheat.
Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?
At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speakers.
A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.
There is evidence that the ranking of students in order of who should get the best entry-level jobs is done mainly by the college admissions process which bins students into more or less selective colleges.
1870 sees the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and the reorganization of continental politics. The US is in dynamic industrial and Western expansion following the Civil War. Britain is in the Long Depression of 1873 - 1896, until the flow of South African gold stops deflation and starts the economic boom. However, Britain is not competitive with the US and Germany and depends more and more on its Imperial system of trade.
Now consider that 1989-1991, with the reorganization of China following Tiananmen and the collapse of the Soviet Union are a similar epochal reorganization of global power structures.
It seems likely that we are now in our own Edwardian Era.
The Sud Aviation Caravelle first flew in 1955 and entered revenue service in 1959.
It was a small airliner with two engines in the rear. Although the Caravelle was retired in 2005, the twin rear engine layout was used by the very successful DC-9, MD-80 series, which is still flying, as are the similar Embraer ERJs. Twin rear mounted engines is also the design used by most private jets.
A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.
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