We’re surrounded by more information than at any time in history, but we value it less letting public spaces that house this information languish in licenses and budget cuts. Whether it’s a public library, AI, or the books on your shelf, this information only has value if we use it.

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The Library Is the New Blockbuster – And It’s in Trouble

My wife and I occasionally still remember fondly our Friday night trip to Blockbuster to get a few movies for the weekend. We didn’t have much money in those early years and the trip to choose a video was our date, as was the weekend with a movie or two. It was all we could afford, and we had great debates over the movie we’d be watching, with each of us revoking the other’s choosing privileges if we picked a bad one.

While video rental stores are gone now, my local library still has movies to borrow when we hear about a movie that sound interesting but we may not want to own. It’s even better than a store too because I can rent without cost.

Just like when browsing for a book, you get serendipity¹ rearing its head when you browse for a movie in the library. You may go in looking for one thing and come out with entirely different items in your hand because as you browsed the shelves that’s what stood out to you.

Public libraries welcome almost anyone and provide services to many, like computer access for those that can’t afford a computer at home. In a library you don’t need to purchase something to be welcome, you just have to not disturb anyone. This makes it the only space in many cites that an unhoused person can exist and have shelter from the cold or heat² without being moved along within a few minutes of arrival.

But our libraries are in trouble. During a recession both libraries and public schools see more use as the public can’t afford to purchase education or reading materials, and it’s during this time of increased usage a library will see its budget cut³. Budget cuts have libraries turning to other forms of revenue to stay open with some renting out all desks to workers making it no longer a place that’s free to use for the public⁴. It has become a pay to play coworking space to feed the obsession with tech workers and their ability to save us from anything with more technology.

Digital book borrowing cuts into the already stretched budgets of libraries, as publishers sell digital copies as licenses charging again every few checkouts, thus turning a library into a constant cash flow. With physical media the library can purchase one copy, and then lend it out many times without needing to pay again for the use of the asset. Knowing this I only ever borrow a digital book if it’s not accessible in any other form because it’s a continued cost to my library which means they can’t do other projects that are on their list.

One of my favourite displays at my local library was the banned books section. The one that made me most laugh was Hop on Pop being attacked by some patron for promoting abuse towards fathers. No my library didn’t remove it, they proudly displayed this profane book. Now libraries in many countries are coming under fire as ideology aims to remove books from the public consumption because they discuss uncomfortable topics.

We need to support our libraries, especially if we’re affluent enough to not need them. I do get some books from my local library, but I purchase far more books than I borrow. Even though I purchase more books than I borrow, I still support my library financially monthly because I don’t want a world where information is only accessible to those that are rich enough to purchase it.

We Trust Machines More Than People

There is a stupid tendency all of us easily fall into, we trust computers more than people. Your neighbour can tell you something and you don’t believe it, but if you read it online the same content gets taken as fact easily bypassing any filter that would eliminate falsehood and is believed.

Worse yet, we accord even more trust to AI systems as they regurgitate the internet to us⁵. We are less likely to verify the facts AI spits out at us, even be willing to tell a true expert that the bot said they were wrong.

It’s important to remember that tools like ChatGPT have been trained on both the good and bad parts of the internet. They’ve seen the conspiracy theories and gone down the rabbit hole reading about how true these falsehoods are. AI has no way to know which claim is true, it just regurgitates its best set of words to you and is rewarded if it gives you information you think you want.

AI has no filter, confidently telling you to eat rocks to help digestion or to put glue on pizza⁶. Lies are sent to us with the same confidence as truths, leaving us to try and weed through their output in a sometimes futile effort to find where the truth is.

Companies have jumped on the bandwagon as they see claims about AI increasing worker productivity. They are rushing to deploy AI to their company so they aren’t seen as behind the times⁷, regardless of the preference of their workers. In fact some workers are being required to use AI as if it’s some mystical performance enhancer instead of a tool that can be used in certain specific use cases. Though for many the hard-on for AI backfired as they now realize they need people with expertise to do a job that AI is not capable of in any way.

I use AI in some places because it works. I can scaffold out some code easily, or it will catch a missing comma in my code. I’ll use the wrong type of comparison between two values and my code will fail silently, but ChatGPT will see it in a few seconds and point out my issue.

Sometimes it’s totally unhinged though, producing code that doesn’t work by any stretch. Without an intimate knowledge of what I’m looking at I’d just be going back to the chat window saying the code didn’t work and getting something new back, taking me longer to make any progress.

There is some utility in AI, but it’s not infallible. AI requires an expert to look at the results and evaluate them. We need to remember this when we look into something we’re not an expert in. The response is just as often wrong in a field you don’t know about as it is in a field you do know about. With an unknown field we don’t have the tools to evaluate the correctness of the output so we’re at far greater risk of falling for falsehoods.

Ask for the sources. Read the sources. Vet the sources. Use the response as a starting point, then dig deeper and be responsible for the output you use.

Your Bookshelf Is Potential — Your Actions Are Output

Walking into my office you’re greeted by a wall of books. I enjoy adding books to my wall and think of all the value present there. But an unread book has little value to me. Even a book I’ve read has little value until it’s turned into an output.

I choose to turn much of what I learn into output in the form of writing, but it doesn’t have to be online for the public. You could read A Brief History of Misogyny and then be a better man that stands for equality for women and does something about it. That’s output as much as writing or making a video would be. That type of output has a benefit to those directly around you, making their lives better.

1. BiblioTECH Pg 207 ↩︎
2. The Library Book takes a good look at this ↩︎
3. The Promise of Access Pg 54 ↩︎
4. Against Creativity Pg 100 ↩︎
5. Co-Intelligence Pg 67 ↩︎
6. Not with a Bug But with a Sticker Pg XX ↩︎
7. Not with a Bug But with a Sticker Pg 4 ↩︎