The college students who can't read good anymore

Miranda's dad was the headmaster of a well-known prep school, and his latest education obsession was with restricting his students’ use of AI. He wrote op-eds in the papers about how LLMs were destroying kids’ reading comprehension, how nobody could read books anymore. It was honestly a bit funny, because everyone at the school knew that Miranda was, by far, the most skillful user of the software.

Her history teacher was the most aggressive about trying to catch her out. Miranda got called into Mrs. Morrison's office after Miranda delivered yet another solid A- paper.

"Are you telling me this is your work?" said Mrs. M.

"Yeah," Miranda said. "I'm sorry. I'll study harder next time."

"So tell me then about the Dred Scott Decision. What were its ramifications?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "You know that stuff goes out of my head the minute the paper is written."

"Miranda!" said Mrs. M. "You are only harming yourself."

"I'll try to remember harder! It's just...we have so much work. I was up until 3 AM working on that paper."

"What do you think will happen at this rate? You are only cheating yourself, Miranda."

"I...I can work harder. I just...I'm sorry..."

Every week another kid ran afoul of the AI policy. But Miranda stonewalled. Never admitted wrong-doing, and they could never prove anything. She didn't hate her teachers. She just didn't want to waste her life writing papers on Civil War stuff.

She got into Dartmouth, where her father had gone, and she used the same techniques there. She majored in English, because it was mostly papers—unlike Econ or Poli-Sci where there were in-class essays and problem sets. Her dad was very proud of her. He told everyone about his daughter the English major, keeping the canon alive. At one point she had a brainstorm. She wrote out a list of classic books, and she started generating summaries of each one. By now she'd trained her model to produce a uniquely-Miranda style of insight, loving-but-irreverent. Now whenever she talked to her dad, she always had the name of a new book on hand.

"Sebald!" he said. "Good god girl, you'll lose your life amongst the Austrians. Tell me you'll at least read Zweig as well."

"What's his best?" she said.

Her dad was from an old-money family. He was a disappointment to his own dad, who hadn't approved of Miranda's mom. But somehow word percolated back to Great-Uncle Eldon that Miranda was a serious reader.

Great-Uncle Eldon hadn't cared about books. He'd spent his life on just one thing, investing the family trust. But he invited her to spend the holidays with him, just to size her up. He picked her up from the airport himself, in his black sports-car, and the moment she was in the car he raised one woolly eyebrow.

"So you're a reader?" he said. "You're a student?"

"I...I don't know."

He laughed. "Your father..."

She spent the day lounging about the estate, walking through its many pavilions and sitting next to its fountains. The estate was full of people—not just staff, but cousins as well, full-time moochers off her Great-Uncle.

Two days into her stay, her Great-Uncle called her into the operations room, with all its wood-paneling and terminals and screens, with its antique furniture from the 18th-century and its old Japanese prints framed and hung on the wall. He sat down next to her in the empty room, in front of those dozens of blazing screens, and he started walking her through their operations.

"You are capable of reading these at least," he said.

He talked to her about the structure of the family trust and how it was governed. Then, as he took another whiskey, he told her about the arcane fights, behind the scenes—about her father's persistent efforts to get him dethroned.

"Charity," he said. "He wants to give to charitable, philanthropical causes. That school of his. The school you attended. He wants money for the school. Is that what you want?"

"No, sir," Miranda said.

"So quick to answer."

"Money should stay in the family."

Over the next several years, she visited him more often, and in the summers she interned with him, drawing the ire of her cousins. She learned that the investing itself was the simplest part of this job. By far the more difficult part was obfuscating and twisting around the finances, so you couldn't be replaced, and then doling out money carefully. Too little, and the family would get angry. Too much, and they'd become independent and start wanting more.

"Keep them lightly sated. That makes them grateful," Eldon said.

He practiced the same thing with her. She had a good apartment. She had a car. When traveling for work, she flew business class. But she never felt rich, could never splash out on a fancy vacation or buy expensive clothes.

Her father was ecstatic, and he allowed himself to say, one Christmas, "I hope, if...perhaps it's too presumptuous, now that you are grown. But if you were ever to take over for my uncle, I would hope you might be more civic-minded than perhaps my uncle has been…”

This was an odd side of her father. Now he cringed in front of her, aware she was closer than he to the money. That she, potentially, controlled his own bank accounts, and that a word from her could destroy his hopes of a future windfall.

She dreamed sometimes of punishing him, punishing her own dad, for the lies he'd made her tell. He still talked about the books she'd read, still held up the fact that she'd majored in the humanities, not realizing everyone knew the truth, that they laughed at him and her for it. She didn't know books, but she knew human beings, and she understood that Eldon had picked her because she was dishonest. That this dishonesty had contributed directly to everything she had.

Her first fight with her father came when she refused to enroll her children in his school. They'd learned to read and write and figure already—what more did they have to know? She kept them home, in a little room on the estate, with a tutor she'd persuaded Eldon to hire. They read through piles of books just for fun, for the pure pleasure of knowing what was in them, and she never asked each day what they'd done.

At Eldon's death, they found the estate much reduced. Miranda had suspected this would be the case, though she'd hoped it wasn't true. Eldon had cared about just one thing, maintaining control, and to that end he was incentivized to stash money away in strange investments that nobody else could understand. But those investors had no incentive to produce a return, just like Miranda had no incentive to ruin her uncle's scheme. She'd been hired as a crony, and she'd fulfilled that function ably.

And yet, in the scramble, she pried loose just enough to live upon.

The machines now ruled the Earth, making strange shapes in the sky—tall towers to which they admitted no human beings. And she and her family scratched around at the bottom, living off whatever the machine-minds budgeted to prevent rebellion, living quietly, cunningly, waiting for their main chance, just like humans always had.

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