Why read if AI can do it for you?

All right, I'm fired up about this one. So here we go. If you've ever wondered why you should read a book instead of having AI summarize it for you, here's why. I'm going to be pulling from the book Walden; or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.

You've probably heard of this book, it's just Thoreau talking about trying to live simply and he lives in a small house by the pond and the image is quite popular. There's a song called "Walden Pond" by Atta Boy that I quite like. Or you might know him from this quote:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

This quote is not the point of the post, although it is a very good quote so take a moment to reflect on it.

In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau's talking about building his own house. He built his own little shack by the lake and he's contemplating in this chapter. Man, this is kind of nice, you know. Why doesn't everyone build their own house? He says:

"Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?"

Which is kind of a stretch. I don't know if he's factually saying, "This is what would happen" or it's more just making an observation on how far we've come from nature, so to speak. But then he said something I thought was really profound:

"Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. Where is this division of labor to end? And what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me, but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself."

He's saying, hey, just because someone can do something instead of you doing it doesn't mean they should. You know, you can outsource everything, but don't you want to do some things? Thoreau's saying, "Yeah, someone else could build my house. But you know, I'm living in it and I have the time and this seems pretty normal to do."

Now I'm not going to make the case here that we should build our own houses. That sounds intriguing honestly, the log cabin fever hits pretty hard once you finish the book, but I'm going to suggest we should be building our mental houses. Thoreau's living in a house by the pond that he built himself and he has the pleasure of seeing what he built. We spend our whole day in our own brain and I think it's pretty normal to want to construct and put into that things that you are proud of and things that you want to see and you want to do that yourself.

I don't want to get caught up in the web of talking about AI. This is not an anti-AI video, this is a pro-reading post and I think AI is intriguing and has its uses for sure. 100%. But as someone who just now had to work kinda hard to get through Walden, right? It took me a little bit of time I thought, could I maybe learn the same things quicker with AI? And I tried it out.

So here's what I asked ChatGPT just a second ago. I said, "Can you summarize the main takeaways from the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau?" and I'm pretty sure I've said Thoreau's name differently a couple times in this post. Oopsie. And here's what ChatGPT said:

"Certainly! "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau is a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings. Here are some main takeaways:

Simplicity
Self-reliance
Nature
Individualism
Spirituality
Civil disobedience"

And then it summarizes each of those points and you know what? It's pretty accurate. I'm not seeing anything in here that I would say goes against the book at all. So my point here is not, "Hey, think for yourself because other people or AI are going to get it wrong." That has nothing to do with it. The point isn't the quality of the answer. The point is the quality of the process.

If you would argue that just by reading this ChatGPT summary you could get the same thing out of it as you would by reading, I would say you know that's not how that works. You can't just read a list of bullet points and then understand the lessons. If that was the way things worked, then when we were like five years old everyone would have lined us up and said, "Hey, just so you know, we figured out how to live here on Earth. We'd like for you to all be kind, share, work hard and be creative and some other things." And then we would all nod and say, "Yes, of course. Yes, ma'am." And then we would just be that forever.

That's not how it works. You can't just read a list of bullet points and be transformed. Transformation of your mind and of your life takes time and effort and energy. And to actually have that be a part of your life, a book is the perfect vehicle, right? Someone else can think for me. This computer does know what is in the book. And if my goal in life was to pass a test for an English class on this book, this is an incredible tool. But is that the goal? Is the goal to pass a test?

Now, I know what you're thinking. "But we're in school right now. There are tests. There are essays. Isn't the goal to pass?" And yeah, I get it. I'm right there with you. But here's the thing – even with all these assignments and tests, there's something bigger going on.

The process of reading slowly, working through a book, and figuring out "Wait, what does this mean?" or "This is kind of boring" or "This is a little repetitive" or "This is taking longer than I thought" – that's all part of the learning process. It's like we're building our own mental houses, just like Thoreau built his physical one. It takes time, but it's worth it.

I've seen so many of us begging to use ChatGPT for our essays. And I get it, I really do. But then I started thinking – isn't the point of an essay to express what we're thinking? If we're outsourcing our thinking, what are we even doing here? Are we just going to sit back and let AI do all the work? Is that the end goal?

Look, I'm not saying AI is bad. It's a tool, and it can be super helpful. But if we rely on it for everything, we're missing out on the chance to build our own mental houses. Our minds are where we live every day, and there's a real joy in putting in the work to make that space richer and more interesting.

So, what do you think? What's a book you really had to work through, and why was it worth it?

Also, thanks to people like

@Chinnu B

and

@Kevin D

, who are providing really good summaries of the lessons we can learn from books. Their summaries are at least better than AI-generated ones. And if you like the lessons you learn from their summaries, it would be great to take the time to read the book too. The stories in the book make you understand the concept and the lesson better.

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