Image:Rentahuman.aiAIが人間を雇う時代が来た？イーロン・マスクは「この先AIが高い生産性と効率を持ち、人間は『ユニバーサル・ハイ・インカム（雇用に関係なく得られる収入）』を得られるようになるため、貯蓄なんてする理由はない」と語っています。でも最近、「人間がAIエージェントに雇われる」というウェブサイトが公開されました。AIがもっとパワーを持つ未来では、こっちのほうが現実になるか

Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History): As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again. The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn't as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don't find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the "death of reading" thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small...? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse...? There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren't sticking around for it... Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it's more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper... It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. The author mocks the "death of reading" hypothesis for implying that all the world's avid readers "were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JASM（TSMCが過半数を出資）の工場入口にあった看板Photo:かみやまたくみ2024年4月4日に公開された記事を再掲しております。ご存知ですか？熊本県の菊陽町（きくようまち）。世界的な半導体メーカーTSMC（TaiwanSemiconductorManufacturingCompanyLimited）の工場が来た町です。TSMCといえばApple（アップル）のiPhoneのチップを作っている