Why Read When There's a Faster Way?

We've been doing this for decades: fiction tells us exactly what's coming and we file it under entertainment.

Jurassic Park is a movie about the catastrophic consequences of deploying technology without stopping to ask whether we should. The scientist says it, literally, in the middle of the film. We watched it, nodded, probably quoted it at some point, and kept going. Because it was a movie. Because it was dinosaurs. Because fiction is what you consume to relax, not what you consult before making decisions.

Now we're having the same conversation about AI.

Different blazer, same logic: we can do it, therefore we will do it. And anyone who raises the 'should we?' question gets categorized as afraid of progress, as someone who doesn't understand technology, as a dinosaur — with a very particular irony that apparently nobody finds funny.

The pattern isn't new. We had it with social media, with genetic engineering, with financial deregulation. In every case there were stories — fiction, essays, academic research — that described what was coming with a clarity that should have been uncomfortable. In every case we treated those warnings as intellectual exercises or entertainment products, not as information relevant to decisions being made in real time.

The problem isn't that we lack imagination. The problem is that we've decided fiction doesn't count as data.

And so we keep arriving surprised at a future that was described for us in advance.

What would we have to change in how we read so that what we read actually changes what we do?