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We live in an age of generative AI services of every kind. Among them, summarization services keep popping up. You all know this already, so it hardly bears mentioning, but ChatGPT will summarize an article for you, and there are services like Lillys that summarize YouTube videos.
No matter how far AI services advance, there is one skill you must never depend on them for. That skill is summarizing. To put it a bit more impressively, it's the ability to abstract. The moment a knowledge worker outsources their capacity for abstraction to someone else, their competitive edge will evaporate at breathtaking speed. It's the same as having a robot lift the barbell an athlete is supposed to lift, or having a robot play the pieces a pianist is supposed to practice every day. The ability to abstract must never be outsourced to anyone; it has to be trained daily.
People say we're heading into an era where the ability to ask questions matters more. I agree. And that's precisely why the ability to abstract will matter even more. It's the ability to look at an idea and see it from a wider vantage point. An abstracted idea is easy to connect to the mental models you already hold. And an idea that has been abstracted and connected in that way makes it easy to pose questions from a macro perspective, or to pose questions grounded in other ideas. (Doesn't this connect to permanent notes in Zettelkasten?)
What's more, if you keep using summarization services, you'll lose the patience to dig deep into content. After reading only the summary, you feel like you've got the gist of it. (The Dunning–Kruger effect.) With any piece of content, the details are what actually matter. Knowing a superficial summary gets you nowhere. Because the problems show up when you try to apply it.
Of course, there are moments when summarized content shines. That's when you want a rough sense of a particular concept. It's for deciding whether or not to go deep on that content. We live in an age drowning in information, after all. You look at the summary, judge whether this is information that matters to you right now, and decide whether to go further down the rabbit hole.