Is the reluctance to read (and maybe even write) a feature and not a bug?

I loved this provocative TEDx talk (the title is far more provocative than the ideas themselves :-) ) by Victor Ribarpelli.

I’ll let you listen to the talk, but the part that really resonated with me is the points he starts to make around 6 mins in - perhaps people aren’t losing attention spans - they just have dramatically more efficient ways now to consume information (e.g. watching YouTube videos vs. reading something to learn a topic). As AI empowers truly customized learning and transformations (NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews are a great example of this), reading about a topic will become more of a fallback as people can customize how they consume information - e.g. what is a doc for you, can be a tailored powerpoint for someone else and a podcast for another person.

I write to clarify a topic in my head sometimes, but I can imagine talking to a system might actually work dramatically better. And while now, writing text (for example even this post!) is the most efficient way for me to get an idea out of my head for your consideration, it could easily have been audio (or with some more time) video instead. As the tools get better, it very well might - at that point - and I do think it’s a couple of generations away and would require us getting the tools right - less reading and writing to enable a higher bandwidth exchange of ideas seems very possible.

What do you think?