I discovered Readwise a couple of years ago from an Obsidian YouTube video by Nicole van der Hoeven. She explained how she syncs her Readwise highlights with her Obsidian vault, and she walked through the process step by step.

I would say that Readwise and Obsidian are my two great computer loves right now, besides ChatGPT of course. I love tools that help me gather ideas, but gathering ideas is not the same as becoming wise.

Readwise is a storehouse for all of my Kindle highlights, as well as additional highlights from paper books and online articles. It also has the capability to add highlights from sources like Medium, X/Twitter, and email newsletters.

But it is more than a storehouse. The daily email uses spaced repetition to randomly resurface your highlights. You can choose how often you want any book, article, or source to reappear in your email reviews. This helps you remember and integrate your reading, so it doesn’t just go in one ear and out the other.

A more recent feature added to Readwise is the ability to chat with your highlights. This blew my mind, although I have only lightly experimented with it.

In my previous Obsidian article, I talked about the smart notes system as promoted by Sönke Ahrens. The idea is that you take little “atomic” notes, or bite-sized ideas, from various sources and put them in a bank. Then you make links between the notes to formulate new ideas that can be used for a future essay or book.

With Chat with Your Highlights, artificial intelligence can create probably hundreds of new book ideas in a day, connecting one’s highlights across books. At first, I was like: OMG, I’m going to be so productive. I’m going to write so many books.

The problem with using AI in this manner is that my limited human brain is no match for the mechanical power of sorting, matching, and calculating of AI. Furthermore, my readers are human beings too. Their brains are not designed to digest mountains of information in milliseconds the way AI can.

While I absolutely love artificial intelligence and dread to think of my life without it, it has its downsides.

This is something I have heard some companies say about jobs related to AI: that it is necessary to hire people to run the AI efficiently. It cannot do it by itself. It needs direction. I recently watched an hour-long AI training video on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel that I highly recommend. I will break down the key things I learned from it in another blog post.

The thing is, which God are we worshiping?

The God of Productivity and Capitalism and the Never-Ending Content Treadmill?

Or are we interested in the Divine who is nurturing, abundant, protective, loving, sensitive, and supportive?

Readwise as a tool can absolutely support both visions of God.

It is up to each human user to decide which vision matches their internal and external goals as a human being.