Books that are no longer read by anyone cease to exist. AI is their grave.

In the space of just a few years, the world seems to have become overrun with techno-psycho-neurologists, philosophising engineers and advertising journalists who lecture us on the ‘Brave New World’ and new ways of living ‘smart’. We will be more comfortably connected to ourselves and to others, through our new digital and telematic ‘soul’, neighbours to those living in Greenland or Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, Saxony or Andalusia, and above all, artificially highly intelligent. As for knowledge and culture, it will be enough (it is already enough) to consult AI, whilst simply taking care, please, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, reliable information and the increasingly frequent instances of underhand manipulation. In international politics, plagued by hybrid warfare – a field in which Putin and Trump are masters – battles are fought with a barrage of lies and propaganda missiles.

However, I do not wish to discuss that topic; my knowledge is limited and my interest is minimal, given that, apart from simple common sense, I am at a loss. What interests me is the fact that the transmission of knowledge and learning, as well as the historical tradition of culture, have almost nothing to do with the vast accumulation of data accessible via AI, and instead have a great deal to do with the systematic and comprehensive reading of books, particularly those to which we owe irreplaceable experiences. In the age of Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Gemini and hacking, few seem to reflect on the act of reading books from cover to cover, turning them into a personal experience. What happens to individuals and their social lives when they read Tolstoy and Baudelaire in book form? Without individuals belonging to the human race (everything happens within individuals before it does in society) reading the classics and the so-called ‘sacred’ scriptures, talking about artificial intelligence is a sham and an abstraction.

If there is one thing that should be taught and practised in schools and universities, it is to read at least a dozen books thoroughly. Three ancient classics (for example, Plato, Seneca, the Gospels). Some modern classics up to the nineteenth century (for example, Shakespeare and Rousseau, Leopardi and Melville, Dickinson and Dostoevsky). Finally, a selection of great moralists from the last century, ranging from Freud and Kafka to Musil and Eliot, Auerbach and Simone Weil, Orwell and Primo Levi… These latter authors are referred to as ‘moralists’ because the twentieth century transformed humanity, and there can be no culture or humanity without moral reflection on totalitarian regimes, extermination camps and atomic weapons.

George Steiner, the last of the internationally renowned literary critics, spoke repeatedly at the end of the twentieth century about culture as a bridge between the human and the inhuman. In the introduction to his book of essays Language and Silence, Steiner writes that language has degenerated into subservience to propaganda and advertising in mass cultures – the culture industry and political falsehood: ‘Are we perhaps emerging from a history of verbal dominance, that is, from the classical period of literary expression, to enter a phase of post-linguistic forms or of growing silence?’ What is the current state of literary criticism and the teaching of literature in academia? ‘Never before have scholars read reviews and explanatory texts rather than the literary works themselves (…) the function of criticism is above all to tell us what to read and how to read as whole, non-specialised human beings’.

It is therefore on this act of reading that the fate and survival of cultural tradition now hinge. Centuries of written culture will once again have to pass through the filter of individuals focused on the pages of an open book. Artificial intelligence is the opposite of this. It is a concept that envisions a world in which non-human entities make decisions. Literary works that are no longer read and reread by an individual cease to exist. AI serves no purpose. It is their grave.