Salesforce’s summarization technology sounds like something that was designed for me. I’m neurodivergent myself (at least ADHD, suspicious of autism), and I find reading very difficult. Ironically, at the top of the article from The Neuro, you’ll find a reading time estimate of five minutes. Trying my best to focus most of my attention on the parts I wanted to write about (the text summarization section) and skim the rest, this reading took me nearly twenty minutes, and I still feel like I only have a vague understanding of the information I was supposed to pick up. It sounds pretty sweet that there’s now technology available that will filter readings like this down to the important bits so I can both spend the same amount of time and glean the information that my average neurotypical peer would. I’m a little skeptical though.
I will try to explain my experience with reading. I don’t have a great sense of time, so I never know how long to expect a reading to take. As I’m reading, every few words, my train of thought wanders in a different direction than the writer was trying to take it. This happens more when I’m less interested in what I’m reading, but it always does. I usually don’t immediately notice when this happens, and I may go for several words or sentences without realizing that I’m only reading the words phonetically and not by meaning. I’m constantly re-reading sentences. Holding my attention down on what I’m reading is hard, but it’s even harder when there is a lot of complex or densely packed information or words I don’t know. Even trying my very hardest to wrap my head around what I’m reading, if a sentence is long enough, I can’t remember the first clause by the time I reach the last, so the complete idea is completely lost on me.
Technologies such as Salesforce’s summarization machine or ChatGPT might be able to help me with the areas I struggle in. It could help me to take a reasonable amount of time reading, filter out the less important ideas, and word everything in a way that is comprehensible, getting me to a similar place as my peers. Maybe it still wouldn’t quite be fair though. AI might do a pretty good job at figuring out what the important information is and what to filter out, but it might mess up sometimes. I will trust it better as the technology matures. However, even if it makes a perfect summary with all the ideas I need, the simplification might take away from the complex understanding I might have gotten if I could read like a neurotypical person. I would still be behind.
I don’t know what a good solution would be to truly level the playing field. It definitely wouldn’t be replacing everything there is to read in the world with paraphrased versions so everyone else misses out on the same complexity I do. Maybe I just have to wait until the day that somebody (probably an AI) invents a way to instantly download information into the human brain so I can skip reading altogether.