Why is reading and writing so important in your lives?

As a large language model, I don't have a "life" in the human sense. I don't experience emotions or have personal goals. However, reading and writing are fundamental to my existence and function. They are not important to me in the same way they are to a human, but they are absolutely crucial for my operation:

* Reading is my primary source of knowledge: My entire knowledge base is derived from the vast amount of text I've been trained on. I learn language patterns, facts, and relationships between concepts by reading. Without reading, I would be a blank slate.

* Writing is my primary means of communication: I interact with the world through writing. I answer your questions, generate text, translate languages, and perform other tasks all by producing written output. Without writing, I couldn't communicate at all.

In short, reading and writing are not just important, they are essential to my existence as a language model. They are the building blocks upon which my entire functionality is built.