Libraries as the Edge of AI

Alberto Manguel saw a library ‘not as a place to preserve books but as a reader’s workshop’. He titled the chapters of The Library at Night as sixteen declarations, casting the library as Myth, as Order, as Space, as Power, as Shadow, as Shape, as Chance, as Workshop, as Mind, as Island, as Survival, as Oblivion, as Imagination, as Identity, as Home.

AI is the latest technology threatening to diminish reading, just when readers are needed most. Every prompt is an act of writing. Every input is a transmission of our authentic selves to a machine. Every output demands a reader who can judge whether the words are true.

Libraries grow readers. The library was the first institution to give me an ID card, granting me the power to borrow books. I regularly read and write surrounded by books at the Boston Athenaeum. My town library chastises me about getting their books back. Readers become writers.

Libraries exist beyond the reach of AI, safe from its purview. Libraries as Authentic Expression, Libraries as Human Workshop, Libraries as the Edge of AI.