{"id":260159,"date":"2026-05-31T05:08:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T09:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/31\/beyond-books-can-we-opt-out-of-the-artificial-intelligence-era\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T06:15:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T10:15:24","slug":"beyond-books-can-we-opt-out-of-the-artificial-intelligence-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/31\/beyond-books-can-we-opt-out-of-the-artificial-intelligence-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Books: Can we opt out of the artificial intelligence era?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/lifestyle\/beyond-books-opt-artificial-intelligence-090840219.html\">Beyond Books: Can we opt out of the artificial intelligence era?<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/lifestyle\/beyond-books-opt-artificial-intelligence-090840219.html\">https:\/\/www.aol.com\/lifestyle\/beyond-books-opt-artificial-intelligence-090840219.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-31 05:08:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.aol.com\">www.aol.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>As I get closer to retirement eligibility, I keep thinking about friends and former coworkers who retired when they felt they couldn\u2019t keep up anymore. I don\u2019t mean physically, but technologically:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"content-list\">\n<li class=\"list-disc\">\n<p>Like when computers replaced the card catalog;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"list-disc\">\n<p>Like when reference went online;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"list-disc\">\n<p>Like when social media took over;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"list-disc\">\n<p>Like when everything became \u201csmart.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each advancement seems to push out a generation of institutional knowledge. At least, that\u2019s been my anecdotal observation.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More: <\/strong>CRCPL&#8217;s summer reading program offers adventure<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m wondering if Artificial Intelligence is that inflection point for me. I mean, I\u2019m keeping up, but at what point do I stop trying? It would be easy to frame that as giving up, but perhaps it\u2019s really a return to something simpler.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not advocating for Luddism, but I am thinking differently about what\u2019s expected of libraries. I don\u2019t think AI or robotics will ever fully replace librarianship, but do humans eventually just become the overseers? If so, that should free us up, right? But free us up for what\u2014and with what? What becomes currency when no one is working? Time? Goodwill?<\/p>\n<p>Setting aside the environmental and ethical considerations for a moment: I use AI often. I rely on spellcheck and punctuation tools. Lately, it\u2019s been my first reader, my editor. But that\u2019s when I choose to engage with the technology.<\/p>\n<p>What has changed in the last few years is a capitulation of choice.<\/p>\n<p>AI is now embedded in everything. Do a Google search, and the first results are AI-generated. Submit a r\u00e9sum\u00e9, and it may be scanned by AI to determine your qualifications. AI is in your phone. It shapes your social media feeds. It tracks what you like, what you buy, and what you might want next.<\/p>\n<p>AI is ubiquitous, and we\u2019ve largely lost control over our personal data, data that must live somewhere, usually stored in vast, energy- and water- intensive server farms. At some point, we should be asking: when do we regain control of it?I know that if I&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/lifestyle\/beyond-books-opt-artificial-intelligence-090840219.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beyond Books: Can we opt out of the artificial intelligence era? https:\/\/www.aol.com\/lifestyle\/beyond-books-opt-artificial-intelligence-090840219.html Publish Date: 2026-05-31&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":260160,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/cv\/apiv2\/aolfp\/images\/og-image.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260161,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260159\/revisions\/260161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}