Reading Aloud in a Silent World

I still remember the weight of Kane and Abel in my small hands, turning pages late into the night while my mother read nearby. She had this way of making our living room feel like the safest place in the world—surrounded by towers of books that grew taller each week, never once hearing a complaint about "too many books" or "wasted money."

My mother didn't just read to me; she read with me. We inhabited stories together, then talked about them over dinner. Jeffrey Archer's tale of two men overcoming impossible odds. Ken Follett's medieval builders raising cathedrals stone by stone, changing the world through patient craftsmanship. The pharaoh's slave who learned to think three moves ahead, managing an empire through wisdom rather than force.

These weren't just stories. They were proof that transformation was possible.

The Expansion Pack for Reality

What my mother understood—and what I only grasped years later—was that fiction doesn't just entertain. It expands your catalog of human possibility. Every protagonist who overcomes adversity adds to your internal library of "things humans can do." Every story of transformation becomes a template you can apply to your own life.

The Courtneys taught me you could plant yourself in foreign soil and grow something beautiful. The Romans showed how systems could outlast empires. The Templars revealed that conviction could move mountains. Alexander proved that audacious dreams weren't just possible—they were necessary.

When I read about builders working for decades on cathedrals they'd never see completed, I learned patience and vision. When ancient strategists outthought their enemies, I began thinking several moves ahead. When ordinary people faced impossible circumstances and found a way through, I filed that away: this too is possible.

Books became my tonic, my refuge, my expansion pack for reality.

The Silent World We're Building

But here's what keeps me awake: we're racing toward a world where AI can summarize any book, answer any question, solve any problem instantly. The temptation is to optimize away the slow, meandering journey of reading. Why spend weeks with Pillars of the Earth when AI can extract the key insights in minutes?

This misses everything that matters.

The value was never in the information I extracted. It was in the time spent inhabiting other minds, other worlds, other possibilities. It was in those quiet hours where imagination could roam free, building empathy and resilience one page at a time. It was in discovering that someone, somewhere, had felt what I felt—or survived what I feared.

My mother gave me something algorithms can't replicate: the belief that every story contained potential medicine for the soul. That the right book at the right moment could change everything. That in the silence of reading, you could hear your own possibilities.

Amplifying the Human Experience

The future of AI isn't about replacing this magic—it's about amplifying it.

Imagine an AI companion that doesn't shortcut the reading experience but deepens it. One that knows when you need the strategic wisdom of ancient advisors or the bold vision of cathedral builders. One that can connect the threads between the books you've loved and the challenges you're facing, not to give you answers but to help you find the right questions.

Not a replacement for human connection, but a bridge to deeper engagement with the full spectrum of human experience.

Because here's what those nights reading with my mother taught me: Knowledge isn't just transferred through facts and summaries. It's transmitted through presence, through shared wonder, through the patient accumulation of stories that slowly reshape how you see the world.

The Books That Made Us

I turn to these books still. When I'm lost, when I'm doubting, when I need to remember what's possible. They're not just stories anymore—they're part of my operating system. The slave who became advisor. The builders who thought in centuries. The warriors who planted new roots in foreign soil.

In our rush to make everything efficient, we risk forgetting why we read in the first place. Not to extract information, but to become larger than ourselves. Not to find answers, but to discover we're capable of writing our own story.

The world needs AI that understands this fundamental truth: that the slow, inefficient, deeply human act of losing yourself in a story is not a bug to be fixed. It's the feature that makes us human.

My mother knew this. She built me a sanctuary of stories, a safe space to dream without limits. Now, as we build the digital worlds our children will inherit, we must ask ourselves: Are we creating spaces for imagination to flourish? Or are we optimizing away the very experiences that make us who we are?

Because in the end, those books didn't just teach me what humans could do. They taught me what I could become.

And that's a lesson no summary can replace.