The cost of intelligence is getting to zero

I’ve always set a yearly goal for how many books I want to read. This year, my target is twelve—one per month. Whenever I see someone who reads a lot, I immediately assume they’re intelligent. After all, reading seems like a quick way to gain expertise in a subject. The more books you read, the more you understand, right?

Right?

Wrong. Simply reading about a topic doesn’t mean you truly understand it. It doesn’t matter how many books you read about tennis if you’ve never hit a ball, or how many photos of a place you’ve seen if you’ve never been there. Reading is not the same as understanding.

Let’s take ice cream as an example. You can read all about the ingredients, how it’s made, and even look at photos of people enjoying it. You can list every flavor and topping in great detail. But if you were to send that information to someone on another planet, they still wouldn’t “get it” the way you do.

Even after reading everything about ice cream, you still won’t understand it until you experience it for yourself—taking a scoop, bringing it to your mouth, and feeling the cold near your lips. Only then do you understand how your tongue reacts to the frozen spoon and the sensation it brings.

Experience is key to true understanding.

This is one of the fundamental limitations of technologies like ChatGPT. There’s much more to understanding something than just words. You could recite every romantic novel ever written, but that doesn’t mean you truly know what it’s like to be in love.

This isn’t a rant against reading books—far from it. It’s a realization that to genuinely understand something, you must also experience it. Reading about self-improvement is a good start, but you need to put those lessons into practice. Read about a dessert recipe, then go and make it, taste it, and learn from it. What you read should be a call to action; knowledge only becomes valuable when you use it.

While the cost of acquiring knowledge is dropping thanks to AI tools, the value of true understanding is on the rise. Wealth is being transferred from those who simply possess knowledge to those who truly understand how to use it. Knowledge is getting cheap, but understanding will increasingly get more valuable.