It’s hard to put this into words succinctly. But when I was a kid before the Internet, the library was the main source of human knowledge, and it was very organized through the Dewey Decimal System which imposed a kind of tree-like hierarchy across a wide spectrum of topics. And while I imagined that one day this might all wind up served by computers, I thought this organization would survive the transition. But it didn’t.
I suppose in the early days of the Internet, they tried? Yahoo was kind of an Internet directory in the beginning, and the Whole Internet catalog was another such effort. But these eventually fell apart and we had to resort to search engines to find anything. Frankly, it’s a bit like the early days of personal computing when we used flat file systems instead of hierarchical ones with proper directory trees. When you were limited to what could fit on a floppy, this wasn’t such a big burden. But the Internet as it stands might as well be a giant flat file system.
Today, even the search engines are failing us, and we are turning to AI. In the pre-Internet era, we had sort of an equivalent to this also. They were called librarians. But a librarian’s job was made easier by the fact that all the books were carefully organized by topic. For AI, it’s as though the library were just a massive pile of books tossed around haphazardly and the librarian had to make sense of it enough to pull whatever you’re looking for out of the chaos. Is it at all surprising, then, that it takes a huge amount of energy and computing resources to make any of this work?
One missing piece is that librarians are acting as curators of the data. Not anyone can come to the library, put books around, and game/pay the book finding process to make sure their books come first. Having human curators behind an internet search engine is not realistic.
Unless the library gets bought by some oil company and they force the librarian to add a lot of pro-oil books.
Those libraries exist and that’s why we publicly fund libraries.
Well, as I recall, things weren’t quite idyllic in the conventional library scene either. People were always moving books around, making librarians furious. Every field trip to the library always began with that lecture. “For the love of all that is holy, do not put books back on the shelf. Let us librarians take care of that.” And once I got to universities with their reference collections, I found that people were purposefully hiding texts in other sections so that they would have exclusive access when they returned. Fun stuff.
I think you’re writing stories for librarians. Their whole existence relies on people using the books. They don’t want you to put the book away because, A- you’ll do it wrong and B- they count them for their general statistics which helps with their funding. They don’t want you being a pretend librarian, they went to school for it and are better at it than you.
People hide books, forget to return books and damage and destroy books. Librarians moniter and curate the collection. Libraries are not museums, the catalog ebs and flows and is a constant state of flux. I can tell you that me wife is happiest when she comes home from working a busy shift where the library was full of people.
Sure, there are the librarians that yell at kids and give you the stink eye for asking questions, but they’re just everyday-sadists and they’re everywhere.