I have believed for a long time that poetry is the deepest and the most compressed thing language can do, and that children's poetry is the gentlest corner of the whole literary world.
Reality is less encouraging. Walk through a bookstore, or look at what people around you actually read in a given week. The share going to poetry is small, and the share going to children's poetry rounds to nothing. People will spend the spare five minutes on trending topics, celebrity news, or the market. Almost nobody spends it on a short poem.
Why we stopped
The easy explanations are that life moved too fast and phones ruined reading. I don't think that's the root of it. The root is that we are still living in a period where functional need dominates almost everything.
Look at how books get bought. A parent picking one for a child asks whether it helps with essay writing, whether there's science in it, whether it will matter for school admissions. We do the same for ourselves — what problem does this solve, what does it get me. By that measure poetry is useless, and children's poetry is more useless still. It won't raise your income or your child's test scores.
Maslow is the usual shorthand here, and it's worth being honest that his hierarchy has held up poorly as a scientific model; people pursue meaning in the middle of deprivation all the time. But something in the neighborhood is real, and it shows up more clearly in the research on scarcity: when a person is preoccupied with money, security, or the fear of slipping, the preoccupation itself consumes cognitive bandwidth. It isn't that reading a poem is forbidden. It's that the mental room it requires has already been rented out.
This is why even comfortable people don't relax. In a society that stays competitive and uncertain, being financially fine is not the same as feeling safe, and someone whose nerves are up all day wants immediate emotional compensation — gossip, outrage, something that hits fast. Poetry asks for the opposite. It wants blank space and patience.
So in a society where most people are still working, earning, and holding a household together, stopping to look at a flower or read a children's poem gets quietly filed as a luxury. Sometimes as waste.
What AI might actually change
Will this shift? I think it might, and the odds aren't small.
Most AI today runs inside software and screens. As it moves into hardware and robotics — as it becomes embodied and starts acting in the physical world — it sets off a change in productive capacity rather than just in white-collar workflow. Physical labor, repetitive cognitive work, large parts of how goods and services get supplied: much of it can be taken over by machines and algorithms.
If the distribution of what that produces is handled well, a meaningful number of people could be released from anxiety about food, housing, and the rest. That is a real possibility, and it would be the first time in history the release was general rather than confined to an aristocracy.
I want to put weight on that conditional, though, because I slipped it past you in a subordinate clause and it is carrying the entire argument. "If distribution is handled well" is not a detail. It is the whole question, and nothing about the technology settles it. Productivity gains have landed unevenly before, and there is no law that says this round will be different.
The part that worries me more
Here is the objection I can't dismiss, and I'd rather raise it myself than have a reader raise it for me.
We have run this experiment already, at smaller scale. Rich countries today are wealthier and work fewer hours than any society in history. Poetry readership did not rise. It fell. The freed hours went to television, then to feeds, then to whatever is engineered to hold attention next. Material release turned out to be necessary for contemplation and nowhere near sufficient for it, because the moment attention is freed, an entire industry exists to capture it, and that industry is better funded and better instrumented than poetry has ever been.
There is a second wrinkle specific to this moment. A model will write you a hundred children's poems before breakfast, some of them decent. So poems are about to be the least scarce thing in the world. What stays scarce is the state of mind in which a person can sit with one — unhurried, undefended, willing to be moved by eight words about the sun. Supply was never the problem. It was always the reader.
None of this makes the hope wrong. It makes it a choice instead of a forecast. Machines can remove the reason we can't read poetry. They cannot supply the wanting to.
The measure of a civilization
Still, the soil matters. When survival stops being the sword over everyone's head, a society finally has the conditions for something other than utility — curiosity, beauty, the pleasure of a thought that leads nowhere useful. Those conditions don't guarantee the result, but without them the result is impossible.
"The sun fell into the water," "and turned into the sunset."
That is the kind of line a child produces without effort and without knowing it is any good. The unspoiled clarity in it is exactly what an affluent age would have the room to treasure, and exactly what a distracted one will scroll past.
How developed a society really is has never been readable from its GDP or the sophistication of its robots. It is readable from whether ordinary people in it have kept the habit and the inner quiet to read something with no use at all. Real abundance is a fullness in the mind and a sense of safety, not a number.
So my hope for the near future is modest. That once technology has taken the survival lock off the door, we sit back down — with a child, or alone — and read one short poem with nothing else running in the background. That may be the loveliest thing a civilization ever looks like.
中文版
一直以来我都相信，诗歌大概是人类语言能做到的最深也最简洁的一件事，而童诗是整个文学世界里最柔软的一角。
现实要冷淡得多。走进书店，或者看看身边的人这一周实际在读什么，诗歌的占比很低，童诗基本可以忽略不计。空出来的五分钟，人们拿去刷热搜、看八卦、盯盘，很少有人拿去读一首短诗。
我们为什么不读了
顺手的解释是节奏太快、手机毁了阅读。我不认为那是根源。根源在于，我们仍然处在一个功能性需求压倒一切的阶段。
看看书是怎么被买走的。父母替孩子挑一本，第一反应是对写作文有没有帮助、里面有没有科学知识、对升学有没有用。我们对自己也一样：这能解决我什么问题，能换来什么。按这套尺子量，诗是没用的，童诗更没用，它既不提高收入，也不提高分数。
这里通常会搬出马斯洛。但需要老实说一句，他那套层次论作为科学模型其实站得不太住，人在极度匮乏中追求意义的例子比比皆是。不过与之相邻的东西是真的，而且在关于"稀缺"的研究里看得更清楚：当一个人被钱、安全感或者掉下去的恐惧占据时，这份占据本身就在消耗认知带宽。读诗并没有被禁止，只是它需要的那块心理空间，早就被租出去了。
这也是为什么条件不错的人同样紧绷。在一个持续竞争、充满不确定的社会里，经济上过得去和感到安全是两回事，而一个整天神经绷着的人，想要的是能立刻兑现的情绪代偿——八卦、愤怒、见效快的东西。诗要的正相反，它要留白和耐心。
于是在一个大多数人还在干活、赚钱、把一个家撑住的社会里，停下来看一朵花、读一首童诗，就被悄悄归到了奢侈那一栏，有时甚至归到浪费那一栏。
AI 可能真正改变的部分
这种情况会变吗？我觉得有可能，而且概率不算小。
今天的 AI 大多还在软件和屏幕里运转。当它进一步走进硬件与机器人，成为具身智能、开始在物理世界里动手，它带来的就不只是白领流程的变化，而是生产能力本身的变化。体力劳动、重复性的脑力工作、社会供给中相当大的一部分，都可能被机械和算法接手。
如果这些产出的分配机制能被处理好，相当一部分人有机会从吃穿住行的后顾之忧里被释放出来。这是真实存在的可能性，而且会是历史上第一次，这种释放不再只属于某个食利阶层。
不过我得把重量压回那个条件句上——我刚才把它塞在从句里一带而过，而它扛着整篇文章。"如果分配处理得好"不是细节，它就是全部问题所在，而技术本身对此不给任何答案。生产力红利此前从来都是不均匀落地的，没有哪条定律保证这一轮会不同。
更让我担心的那部分
下面是我没法回避的反驳，与其等读者提出来，不如我自己先说。
这个实验其实已经小规模做过了。今天的富裕国家比历史上任何社会都更有钱、工时更短。诗歌的阅读量并没有上升，而是下降了。空出来的时间去了电视，然后去了信息流，接下来会去任何一个被设计成能抓住注意力的东西。物质上的解放对沉思来说是必要的，但远远不够——因为注意力一旦被释放，就有一整个产业等在那里接住它，而那个产业的资金和工具，比诗歌历史上拥有过的任何东西都强。
这个时刻还有第二重褶皱。模型可以在早饭前给你写出一百首童诗，其中几首还不错。也就是说，诗即将成为世界上最不稀缺的东西之一。仍然稀缺的，是一个人能安静坐在一首诗前面的那种状态——不赶时间，不设防，愿意被关于太阳的八个字打动。供给从来不是问题，读者才是。
这些都不说明那份希望是错的。它只是把希望从预测变成了选择。机器可以搬走"我们读不了诗"的那个理由，但它搬不来那份想读。
文明的尺度
话虽如此，土壤仍然重要。当生存不再是悬在每个人头顶的那把剑，一个社会才终于具备了容纳非功利之物的条件——好奇心、美、一个不通向任何有用结论的念头。这些条件不保证结果，但没有它们，结果无从谈起。
"太阳掉进水里，" "变成了夕阳。"
这样的句子，孩子不费力气就能说出来，而且并不知道它好在哪里。里面那种未经污染的清澈，恰恰是一个富足的时代才有余裕去珍视的，也恰恰是一个分心的时代会一划而过的。
一个社会究竟发达到什么程度，从来都不能从 GDP 或者机器人的先进程度上读出来。要读，就读这里面的普通人是否还保有那种习惯和那份安静，去读一点完全没用的东西。真正的富足是心里的充盈和安全感，不是一个数字。
所以我对不久将来的期待很朴素：当技术把生存这把锁从门上取下来之后，我们能重新坐下来，陪着孩子，或者一个人，背景里什么都不开着，读完一首短短的诗。那大概就是一个文明最好看的样子。