In the old days knowledge was gated primarily by work: it was almost all available in books, but you had to find the books, read the books and (hopefully) understand them.
Most knowledge was not illegal. A good example is the “Anarchist’s Cookbook”, which includes recipes for explosives. I used to own a copy, though I never made any explosives. But if you wanted better knowledge, just go to a university library (most of which allowed anyone to walk in and read the books, though not necessarily to borrow then) and learn. This was true for poisons, weapon information, guides on how to pick locks, etc, etc… There was very little knowledge you couldn’t find out, IF you were willing to do the work.
What we’re seeing with AI is restrictions on what knowledge AI will provide. For example non-institutional biology researchers have complained that some models won’t help with that: it’s too dangerous. Ask for poison info and you can get it, but it requires very careful wording of the query: no hint of wanting to use the poisons. An author might get thru by saying it’s for a novel. Anything illegal can have the knowledge frozen as well: want to research con-men or burglary or hacking? Might get thru, might not.
As time goes by it’s reasonable to expect these blocks to evolve and become harder to get around. This may seem like a good thing, I guess, but if I want to research poisons, I don’t think the government or private companies should tell me I can’t.
Now this might be OK, IF we weren’t losing the books. There are reliable accounts of AI companies buying books en-masse, then destroying them. Outside of AI, as people move more and more online, books sell less and entire warehouses are being destroyed because it doesn’t make financial sense to keep them. Universities have mostly become “closed” and you get access unless you’re a student or maybe an alumni, and they certainly track what you read (so if it’s a book someone could misinterpret, read it in the library, don’t check it out.)
The old knowledge is going away. The new knowledge is much easier to get, but also much easier to restrict.
Books were beautiful: once they existed, once you had them, they were always there. We’ve all noticed that even leaving aside AI the internet is not “forever”, sites disappear all the time, the Internet Archive and other similar sites are under constant attack, and what you read can and is easily tracked both by government and private enterprise. The life of your mind is no longer private, what you know from online can be stitched together by anyone with enough power who cares to bother, and indeed, there are pre-crime initiatives by people like Thiel, in which dossiers are kept, soon on everyone, and evaluated to see if you’re a threat.
The future looks like a place with easy knowledge, unless the powerful don’t want you to have it, in which case it will be far harder to find than it was before AI or before the internet.
Big Brother knows best, after all.
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Purple Library Guy
“Universities have mostly become “closed” and you get access unless you’re a student or maybe an alumni, and they certainly track what you read”
Um, no, we don’t. Speaking as a university library person who works in the “Loans” department, that’s a nope, both in policy and reality. The software is specifically designed not to keep the information of what people have checked out in the past, precisely because certain US agencies sometimes ask libraries about that and so university libraries have wanted as a feature the ability to say “Sorry, we don’t know”. I suppose it’s possible someone’s hacking us and scraping all the checkout information in real time, but that wouldn’t be the UNIVERSITY tracking what you read.
Brian M
The future looks like a place with easy narrative.
Facts? Knowledge? Wisdom? Perhaps not so much.
Watt4Bob
I have inside knowledge of a university in Canada that is busy destroying their libraries at the behest of/advice of high-priced consultants.
They paid these guys $10M to help them with their finances I suppose, and they have convinced the school that all those books are a needless expense considering the material is available in digital form.
So this university started warehousing their books, in cardboard boxes, sorted, I kid you not, by size.
When you want a book that the library has, but is not on the shelves, you must fill out a request form to have it retrieved from the warehouse. This takes up to 2 weeks.
A person I know well requested some books, and when he and the staff-person opened the box, along with the book he requested, they found a misplaced book that he recognized as rare, and important, and belonging to a 5 volume set. My informant explained to the staff-member that this book should be reunited with the rest of the rare set.
The staff-person explained they were not actually a librarian, the ‘rules’ preclude her from moving the book, and that the best she could do was put a red adhesive tag on the book which would alert the next ‘real’ librarian that opens the box that the book was mis-placed.
My friend told me that he had looked into the ‘consultants’ that were paid the $10M, and that they had left behind a significant number of schools that went broke following their advice.
Jan Wiklund
I would like to see some of the “reliable accounts of AI companies buying books en-masse, then destroying them”. After all, they should be published!
Ian Welsh
Search engines are you friend, guy who said that Nate didn’t have enough links when he had like 50.
Plug this in to the search engine of your choice: “ai companies buying and destroying books”
Feral Finster
IIRC, the version of The Anarchist’s Cookbook that I read contained a caveat that there was nothing in that book concerning weapons, explosives, drugs, methods, etc. that the radical left and radical right didn’t already know. All the Cookbook did was make that knowledge more available.
For that matter, what made The Prince so revolutionary was that Machiavelli spelled out in black and white what rulers had already long known and lived by, even if they told themselves something different. The Prince said the quiet part out loud.
mistah charley, ph.d.
Tom Murphy’s diagnosis of ‘metastatic modernity’ seems very plausible to me, and while “university” and “library” are pre-modern-techno-industrial concepts, the “great simplification” that global society seems likely to go through (using the term favoured by the Institute for the Study of Energy and our Future) may not spare many university libraries. Internet-using apes? Typing apes? Talking apes? Seven generations from now, one wonders how many of each – university libraries, internet users, people that can type, people that can talk – will remain. Fewer than now, probably – but one never knows when something surprising might happen.
mago
The Anarchist’s Cookbook, ha ha quite the screed. I knew someone whose brother used information from said cookbook to send a car load of explosives careening down a mountainside into an expensive ski town.
In my early college years I worked in the university library, and we were all bibliophiles. Throughout my adult life I got a library card wherever I lived and made good use of it. I loved browsing the stacks. Guess I’m a member of a dying breed. Alas, the digital age confers dinosaur status upon me.
Carborundum
Realistically, anything that is thinly circulated enough that an AI firm purchasing a copy, scanning and destroying it (my understanding is that generally the destruction is because they de-spine the book to make the scanning easier to automate) wasn’t really accessible in any case. I have several antique books related to my academic field that were produced in very small publishing runs on the order of a few hundred copies (most are numbered). Sure, destroying one of these measurably reduces the population of the title, but they were only ever accessible to the vast majority of readers through good academic libraries. The objectionable thing here is that we’re not fucking savages and we just don’t destroy books.
In my opinion, the centroid of concern here is twofold. First, running everything through an AI model significantly dumbs everything down – much less detail and heterogeneity. Second, not doing the work of data retrieval and assembly means there’s reduced opportunity to understand how the knowledge is really structured. Together, these factors significantly exacerbate the decades long crisis of epistemology that we’re living in. The modern motto appears to be only electronically available sources matter, if an interpretation has face validity, run with it, and if it’s viral, it must be true.
As a technical note, pretty much any university library system – at least in Canada – will offer some form of research readership access. It will cost because there are real costs associated with running academic libraries, but does not require that one be an affiliated academic.