Indonesia or Sri Lanka? No need to ask AI / Article

Earlier this week I was in one of Latvia’s rural libraries. It’s nice to spend a few hours in one library, a few hours in another. It feels almost like a little holiday within work.

I had been typing away at stories like this one (though considerably shorter) but left a sufficient percentage of my brain-power free to observe the other visitors to the library. A steady stream of people came in through the door, all of them carefully wiping their feet as they entered. This simple thing struck me as exceedingly civilised. People in the country tend to wipe their feet a lot more than those in the city. I have no statistics to back up this assertion.

Each visitor was greeted by the very friendly librarian who clearly knew them all personally. Each was guided towards the shelves and, particularly the rack of new arrivals and was presented with some personal recommendations based upon their previous reads.

“So, what are you in the mood for this week, romance or crime?” asked the librarian to a woman, like herself, of middle age and neat appearance.

“You know, after a week like this, I think romance. I need to get lost in a story,” was the reply. I forget exactly the title of what she walked away with, but it was something along the lines of ‘Desert Silk’. Do people wipe their feet as they enter the tent of a Bedouin chief? Probably.

The fourth visitor looked like a familiar Latvian type: the man from the forest. He wore the regulation rubber mac that reached his knees and is permanently buttoned up to the neck, even in summer. Thick-lensed, thick-rimmed glasses, a faded baseball cap and a dark, reddish complexion that comes neither from genetic inheritance nor alcohol but from living outdoors for decades. He could have been out mushrooming all morning were it not for the fact that in one hand he carried a battered bag full of books and magazines, which he proceeded to unload onto the library counter in two neat piles.

He received an especially warm welcome from the librarian who enquired after his health and what he had been up to recently. He answered in the high-pitched, reedy voice of old age and it was clear that he loved to talk despite being a little deaf. His voice resounded around the bookshelves like an oboe playing in the higher registers.

The man from the forest was also shown across to the shelf of new acquisitions. As his returned books demonstrated, his taste was for travel literature, which he must consume at a rapid pace and the good news was that two new travel books had come in. One was about Indonesia and one was about Sri Lanka. Perhaps these would be of interest?

He pondered out loud: “Indonesia or Sri Lanka? Hmm. Sri Lanka or Indonesia? Both could be interesting. But I will not take both, someone else might want to read. Hmm.” There was a long pause as he devoted tremendous energy to the question of which Asian state would be the focus of his attention for the next seven days. Eventually, he delivered his Solomon-like verdict: “I think Sri Lanka is more in my line at the moment.” Sri Lanka it was.

He also collected some journals, to keep abreast of current affairs, and carefully packed his bag. The librarian asked if he had long to wait until the bus came to take him home. Only about 90 minutes, he said, no time at all, really.

He left with Sri Lanka in his pocket. I left soon after with nothing but a shut-down laptop. The little library had provided a valuable reminder that there is more going on in out-of-the-way places and in the brains of out-of-the-way people than we often think. I liked to think of the middle-aged woman among the romance of desert silks and the man living in a small plot of Sri Lanka in the middle of the forest that would very likely be transformed into Indonesia next week. 

The lessons we can take – perhaps in an earlier age we might have dared use a word such as ‘moral’ – are various, but some are more obvious than others. First, that these underfunded, overlooked little libraries still play an important part in the social, cultural and mental lives of Latvian people – particularly those in rural areas. They are a point of contact, a point of basic human interaction between people in areas with very low population density. They reduce loneliness and, just as importantly, stimulate the imagination. They are good for the brain, we might say – that mushy physical organ of intelligence than is inside our skulls.

It’s worth noting that I was the only one there because there was a free internet connection which allowed me to work online. Everyone else who came in was there – one can barely believe it – to get and read books. Yes, in a library.

Sarcasm aside, this suggests what I think is the most important moral of the case: that there are still plenty of people in our society who are not particularly interested in being fully digitised. We, the online mob, don’t tend to notice them as they are beyond the boundaries of our self-obsessed information bubbles.

These maverick outsiders are somehow managing to lead lives in which social media, likes and dislikes, thumbs up and down, memes and votes for your fave play no part. As people managed to do from the dawn of time until a couple of decades ago. They have lives instead of online presences and memories that reside in those squishy, non-upgradeable brains, not external hard drives. 

Everyone from President Rinkēvičs downwards seems desperate to ‘get’ Artificial Intelligence (AI – as if you needed me to explain that) doing as much as possible as quickly as possible, without ever really being able to explain exactly why, or what they expect it to do other than make things more efficient and cheaper in some vague way. There is more than a whiff of the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) phenomenon about the whole thing, FOMO being one of the defining characteristics of our digital age of stimulus-desire-consumption-stimulus.

In any case, AI is clearly so super-duper-intelligent, it is probably best if we let it decide for itself what it is actually for. It will undoubtedly come up with better tasks for itself than we could ever devise. The fact that we crave it so desperately strongly suggests we regard it as essentially superior to our squishy, organic human intelligence. Until we are able to outsource a sufficient percentage of our thoughts to AI, our soft brains will be unable to reach maximum stimulus absorption capacity.

I venture to suggest that, for good or ill, this is the sort of commentary piece AI could not write, unless perhaps it could take control of our phone cameras and microphones, scrape the data from hundreds of us who prefer to write in a library, and algorithmically deduce that the most likely outcome of these patterns of behaviour is a composition in an outmoded journalistic form called the feuilleton which generally focuses on human beings, and their variety. At which point AI can read and steal the work of thousands of feuilletonistes over the last century (with no danger of facing plagiarism charges) and mash everything together into a grand pastiche of human interest to which some debased author may submissively attach their name.

What a great advance for all of us that will be. Meanwhile the old man in the forest will still be travelling the entire globe from within his own brain as long as new books keep arriving at the little local library.

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