The more I read about AI, the companies behind the construction and fielding of AI and the hallucinations and outright lies and the lengths to which one has to go to pin an AI down to the actual truth of things, the more inclined I am to thinking we need to make sure that the Encyclopedia Britannica is always published in hardback and updated annually by the old system of publishing a new collective volume every year. The old versions must all be retained and safely stored.
The things people know now are largely completely unknown to Gen X and below. They don't know and they don't care and yet these are the essential truths underlying our reality and cannot be ignored for long because that was what DEI was all about and we know how that worked out. History demands controls and it should not be continually rewritten to satisfy the lowest common denominator or the other idiots with academic titles and degrees.
Vernor Vinge captured the future path of AI pretty closely when he wrote Rainbows End. I don't recommend the book to read but the subplot described the plan to equip AI with the knowledge of everything ever written down by feeding it every book ever written and to that end the evil corporation bought all the biggest/best libraries in the world and took the books and dumped them into book shredders so that the optical scanners could store them electronically in the AI database.
As those who have walked into modern public libraries know, there is no need for evil corporation because fewer and fewer books are found in more and more libraries. It's all available online now. Read it on kindle. How this jibes with the accurate recording of The Conquest of Mexico or The Conquest of Peru is best left in the flooded basement. In a hundred years there won't be any modern books left. There is literally nobody who wants them and they end up in the dumpsters.
4 comments:
That is certainly true. I am the director of a small town library. Very few "young" come into the library... To read, take out a book or do research. It's all done online. We are lucky that we have high-speed internet. (2 Gig upload/download) so that helps.
Libraries are among my favorite places to visit and I love the feel of a real book in my hands. But to give Kindle it proper due - it does allow you to adjust the font size to help make smaller print works easier to read for seasoned eyes and the back lit nature does allow for reading even in dimly lit bars.
To be honest, the vast bulk of my reading is in digital form. The only place that I thought still mandated the necessity of the book was scholarship where the goal was to imprint information and the best way I ever found for that was the written word before me on paper coupled with a notebook to write down actual notes in.
I had a little sony pocket reader in the years before kindle that was perfect to slip into a pocket and then go for long walks and settle down in a coffee shop for awhile to read. The charge on that would last for a week of 7 hours a day reading. Of course they promptly went out of business with kindle and the sudden perceived need to connect 24/7 to the internet.
3 of the four of us kids grew up voracious readers and went to libraries and book stores at least twice a week growing up. I imagine the book choosers today face a truly daunting challenge selecting the handful of books to procure for the library every year. The even more daunting task would be in selling away those books to make room for others. Growing up you never saw that aspect to the life cycle of books in libraries.
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