Recently, a young person asked me if I like to read. “Are you kidding?” I answered. “I live to read. When I read, I go on vacation.” The youngster raised his brow and scrunched up his face in confusion, so I clarified. “Reading is like going to a different place, even a different time. You meet all kinds of people doing all kinds of things you could never imagine.”

The conversation moved on, leaving me with the unspoken thought that sinking into a book gives one a chance to experience life as someone else. And to see the secrets known only to those particular people-secret thoughts, secret deeds.

There’s an ethical dimension of reading — the ultimate act of empathy. To know beyond the bounds of one’s personal knowing, and inevitably, knowing creates understanding.

The process of becoming verbally literate, emotionally literate, and preferably literate in both ways involves factors of common symbology and understanding. What do words mean? What does information in written or spoken form tell us that we need to know? These are important questions that are becoming lost in a world based more and more on arbitrary symbols created purposefully by a handful of people. There’s something downright insidious about losing our organic human ability to evolve language and its number one benefit — literacy.

The modern world is devolving into a dystopia of algorithms and androids that have been inserted into our God-given capability to use language and to roll with its changing flow. Tech giants have supplanted time-honored messages like “open” and “close,” “on” and “off” with arbitrary symbols. The elevator symbols for open and close are fairly intuitive, but those of us who are verbally oriented still have to think about it. And do those symbols really save space, or whatever presumed discomfort they’re saving, as opposed to a spartan construction like “open door”?

Traveling involves deciphering a new, mysterious, arbitrary, and distinctly unnatural language of symbols. A car console is full of triangles, lines, circles, and other elementary designs. Using the radio or disc player is a process of trial and error. Sure, it’s a matter of learning this new alphabet of crude pictures, but why? On a recent flight, this writer, a lifelong reader, a reluctant-but-successful conqueror of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” was stymied by my inability to decipher the numerous symbolic directions on the plane — everything from operating the armrests to navigating the bathroom. Are the words “on” and “off” really so cumbersome that disc players need random geometric replacements? As for the in-flight relief and diaper-changing possibilities — well, you’ll just have to watch the YouTube training video.

I find myself lost in the encroaching googleization that assumes a normalcy of three lines meaning one thing and a cluster of squares another. I am perplexed at the notion that we need hieroglyphics to tell us to “Save” our work or to “Log off” or “Shut down.” Who looks at their keyboard and says, “Thank God they put six squares on F4 and three rectangles on F3! That clarifies everything”? I still have to logic out which bell is the mute button. It’s all good; why clutter up a key with “mute” when “F10” takes up so much less space?

Maybe this will save us in the end. I mean, haven’t words been the problem all along? Our affinity for arguing and telling our stories, our own personal literacy, our outreach to the rest of humanity — well, these are apparently so problematic that the time has come to sic androids and algorithms on our verbalizations. China has already embraced “social currency” and Western tech giants are preparing for its advent here as well. In this brave new world, an artificial intelligence of bits and bytes will determine the worth of our existence as displayed by our self-expressions — our stories.

Once upon a time, humans stopped drawing pictures in the sand and telling stories on cave walls. A long time ago, we learned to bind our thoughts on pages we could share with each other and use to understand one another’s lives.

But now it’s time to walk like an Egyptian.

Welcome back to the hieroglyphic future.

Renee Gravelle is a Dunkirk resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com