Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Hong Kong Olympic medallist Siobhan Haughey and entrepreneur Joanna Hotung urged students to prioritise deep reading over the convenience of artificial intelligence (AI).
“AI can give you logic and something that is objective, but it really leaves a big part of the emotions out,” Haughey said during the “Empower Through Reading” panel. The fireside chat was supported by Chanel and brought together dozens of local students. It took place in December.
Haughey gave an example from Allison Larkin's book The People We Keep. She described a scene where the main character, a struggling teenager desperate to reach a singing audition, steals her neighbour’s car.
“If AI were to summarise this ... I would say, ‘oh, she did a bad thing, she stole her neighbour’s car, and it’s wrong’,” Haughey explained.
The star swimmer noted that AI operates in black and white but humans live in the grey areas.
Because Haughey read the text herself rather than relying on a summary, she navigated that grey area of human desperation and lived the character’s struggle page by page.
The message highlighted a critical takeaway for students: AI is a tool for memory, but reading is a tool for thought.
“We cannot outsource our thinking to machines,” said Joanna Hotung, the founder of KG Group Education and the director of the Hotung Mills Education Foundation.
Hotung challenged students to consider the “curiosity gap”.
She argued that while AI is excellent at retrieving data that already exists, it kills the creative spark required to imagine what is yet to come
“We read to prepare for a world we cannot [envision],” she said. “So when we are stuck with something we’ve never seen before – where there is no historical data for the AI to draw from – we choose to think instead of just remember.”
Growth through reading
Before she was breaking records in the pool, Haughey was simply a girl trying to fit in. Her reading journey began with comic books like Old Master Q (老夫子).
“There are a lot of pictures, but not a lot of words. It’s quick and easy and simple, and it’s very fun as well,” she recalled. This anecdote carried an important message to the audience: start with what you love instead of the pursuit of achievement.
Reading does not have to be a lonely journey, Haughey added, explaining that it can be a way to build a community of intellect and empathy.
She described hosting reading meet-ups, where she and her friends would sit together in a coffee shop or park, reading separately but together.
“We’re alone doing our own reading, but then we’re together ... It’s a great way for me to connect,” she said.
