AI and the Printed Word.
Posted by katrinam41 5 days, 21 hours ago to Culture
AI corporations are buying up books printed before 2022, viewing them as uncorrupted and suitable for trading their data base. The books are then destroyed, all of them shredded, including any and all antique tomes. Our history is being processed and destroyed right under our noses.
"Fahrenheit 451", sometimes "The Firemen"
written by US writer Ray Bradbury.
The story takes place here but in the future-
Books have been banned as people are offended by them.
If a house is found with a book in it, the house is burned down -by the Firemen, a government agency.
A group of dissidents have formed and live in an isolated settlement, each one of them has volunteered to memorize a whole book. One person does the New Testament, another Robinson Crusoe, another Peter Pan, various take on the works of Homer and Adam Smith, Darwin and Dickens, and more.
War starts, ends, the city has been destroyed.
The book people have survived, they take on the task of re-building, and printing books.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fahr...
etc
Don't have either but the impressions made on me thedino are permanent.
I have seen too many changes on line in the books that I truly enjoy - Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" comes immediately to mind - so I still have my wall of books.
The Harvard Classics five foot shelf of books has all of one shelf, but the other several shelves have all of the Asimov, Heinlein et al and of course the ligher stuff, like Douglas Adams - I have all 5 of his books in the trilogy in leather covers.
It is great stuff to use get away from the insanity of current life - reading about insanity from someone else's life! A great story.
Bottom line would be my recommendation is to hang onto your real books.
My collection is smaller, but has many titles from the masters of science fiction and freedom/Austrian economics.
Side note: To give an idea of how much we enjoy vintage historical ambiance we've held "candle light dinners" with guests where all electric things are turned off and put away and lighting is done with candles and oil lamp using original 19th century lamps and candle holders. They really come in handy during power failures, too, and we've cooked meals in the fireplace. Hint: If you want to do this make sure you use lamp oil rather than kerosene to avoid much of the odor.
I don't recall the full details. But if they could BORROW, RENT, or BUY and then SELL the books back, it wasn't fair to the authors, etc. because the computers have perfect memory. I also believe it PREVENTS them from taking BOOK X, and offering it to another AI company, etc. etc. etc. Meaning the copyright is real.
The argument was basically that a human is SUPPOSED to READ and KNOW the content. That's all we are doing. The courts demanded them to destroy the books so that every company training on them, have to seek, purchase the information.
NOW... If that's part of a deep start conspiracy to burn/destroy old books, and they used the Judges to do this... IDK.
When Google Originally did this, they did not destroy the books. But I am for digitizing everything.
I am not for destroying Irreplaceable books.
We may not like where they're going, but if someone wants to stop it, they'll have to buy them up, instead.
Here's another post on this topic.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
It's kinda like how one might view the Books of Enoch.