For the longest time, intelligence was measured by the size of your home library and the quiet seriousness of your reading habits. Today, new research, audiobooks, and artificial intelligence (AI ) are transforming how we learn and who gets to be called smart. This is a love letter to curiosity in all its forms and a call to rethink what it really means to be intelligent.
My first love of books began with the library around the corner from my home and a completely weird mix of genres. Archie comics, coming-of-age stories like Honestly Katie John and Hello God It’s Me Margaret, kitschy Barbara Taylor Bradford romance novels, and odd sci-fi reads that seemed completely out of place on my shelves. My parents were used to getting calls from the librarian about overdue books or noticing the light under my door late at night as I pulled yet another all-nighter because I could not put a book down until I had finished it. The smell of books, the feel of turning a page, the quiet thrill of discovering a passage that resonates. That was the beginning of my love of reading. So this is not a piece about bashing books. Far from it. Books are wonderful. They have shaped the way I think and see the world. It is about something else. It is about how we define who gets to be seen as smart.
Class, Privilege, and the Old Rules of Intelligence
For a long time the answer seemed simple. A learned household was full of books, and a learned person was someone who read widely, quietly, and on paper. Shelves groaning under the weight of seriousness became a badge of intellectual legitimacy. That standard has always been tied up with class and privilege. Houses with the space, money, and leisure to fill shelves with books set the benchmark. Intelligence was not just about curiosity or insight. It was about access. If you did not grow up in that kind of household, it was easy to feel like you did not belong in the world of ideas. With that said, this was always a narrow view of what learning can be.
Technology and New Ways of Learning
Then came the Kindle, and suddenly a thousand books could live in your pocket. Knowledge moved from public display to private device. Reading remained the gold standard, but the symbol of intelligence was starting to shift. To that end, people could engage with ideas without proving their credentials through a physical library.
Research into neurodivergent learning pushed that shift further. Comprehension does not happen the same way for everyone. Some people think better while listening. Others while talking through ideas, drawing diagrams, or experimenting. For people with dyslexia, ADHD, or other learning differences, audiobooks are not shortcuts. They are lifelines. Understanding can arrive in many forms, and reading alone is no longer the measure of intelligence.
Democratization of Intelligence
And now artificial intelligence has arrived. AI can read more books in a minute than most of us will read in a lifetime. It can summarise, compare, and extract patterns faster than any human could. But instead of replacing human intelligence, it can expand access to it. People who never had private libraries or formal education now have tools to engage deeply with ideas on their own terms. To that end, intelligence is becoming more inclusive than it has ever been.
This does not make books obsolete. Far from it. There will always be a love for them. The tactile experience, the quiet immersion, the thrill of a good passage. What is changing is our understanding that intelligence is not limited to those with the right environment, resources, or reading habits. It is participatory, plural, and inclusive.
Rethinking What It Means to Be Smart
Once a room full of books told us who was intelligent. Today learning is messier, more dynamic, more alive. It lives in curiosity, in synthesis, and in the ability to navigate ideas across formats. And maybe that was always the point. Intelligence is not a shelf to fill. It is a skill anyone can grow in whatever way works for them.
So if you are someone who judges the intelligence of others by their bookshelf or preferred authors, maybe the next time you feel tempted to judge you can pull back and open your mind to new possibilities of what it means to be intelligent. To that end, you can carry this idea into your own conversations at work or with friends. Pay attention to who is speaking, who is being heard, and how ideas are shared. When we approach conversations with curiosity and openness to different ways of knowing, we create spaces that are more inclusive, more creative, and more alive.
The Middle Slice 