> LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway
LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
PISA is a statistical measurement tool designed for sensitivity to differences in student performance. So it uses questions that some students are expected to get right and some are expected to get wrong, and places the result on a bell curve fit to a reference population.
It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11)
If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.
Even before AI, it was clear that developed societies will be weighted down with an underclass of welfare recipients who are unable or unwilling to develop skills necessary to meaningfully contribute.
As society/technology/the world moves faster and becomes more complicated, more and more of them will be left behind. 1 in 5 Americans are already functionally illiterate, and about 20% of working age men are already out of the labor force.
CIS is an anti-immigration hate group founded by a eugenicist and white supremacist. They're widely condemned for publishing factually incorrect and methodologically flawed reports by organizations across all of the political spectrum, save the furthest right extremists. That is not a legitimate source of information on immigration or welfare.
Do you have any numbers you'd like to provide to counter the claim that a significant portion of the population of working age individuals aren't already out of the labor force?
While I may have responded to your comment, I'm not debating you. My intention was to let other readers know that the sentiments you're expressing are little more than gutter eugenics hiding behind a flimsy facade of academic language and charts.
On a somewhat off-topic note, it seems like even the richest publications no longer employ copy editors, or not enough of them anyway. I am constantly spotting obvious and stupid errors in articles (e.g., duplicated words and misspellings) in the New York Times, Washington Post, et al. I'm certain it didn't use to be that way. (Fact-checkers also seem to have gone extinct; at least once or twice a week I'll read a news article with a glaring factual error or an absurd mathematical error.)
I see that as well. Sometimes I can see that they are prioritizing speed to print for breaking news (publishing to the web happens continuously vs the cadence of a daily newspaper) but often it is just being sloppy.
When most people are consuming _their_ news (as opposed to _the_ news) in the form of a thumbnail in an algorithmic social media feed, those copy errors matter less.
Running a personal site was easy - until we started to overcomplicate it. CMS, vulnerability of it, disappearing sites that we linked in good assumption…
For those who want to use Wordpress, add wordfence plugin immediately after fresh installation.
Doomsayers are so visible now… and people are attracted by dark emotions 8 times more than good ones. So it is quite normal that “AI doom” is so chatted. If we get eventually wiped out by “aliens” (= high AGI), we won’t even know that.
Until then, it's probably better to focus on something where you or me can be useful.
Although a lot of people don’t like talking with automated call centres (press 1, if you want to continue), ElevenLabs’ service focuses on helping plumbers etc. where there aren’t so many incoming calls that it could fully employ someone.
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