Permitted and admitted

 With the rise of casual use of Generative AI software over the past year and a bit (has it really only been that long?), we've also seen a lovely little moral panic sweeping the nation(s).

Should we be using AI? Is it cheating? Is it being lazy? Is it ripping off millions of authors who actually had to work on something? Will it spawn a group of people who can't string a sentence together to save themselves?

The answer to every single one of those questions is "Yes... and no." 

Ever since the Industrial Revolution (which was, as far as I'm concerned, a Bad Idea) we have been devising ways to get a machine to do the bulk of our work for us. 

We replaced ourselves in the field with tractors (and then we replaced ourselves in the tractors with remote control and robots).

We replaced ourselves in the factories with rigs and jigs (and then with robots).

We replaced ourselves in the copyroom with printing presses, and then we replaced ourselves in the typing pool with computers... it was really only a matter of time before we replaced ourselves at the computers with robots.

Replacing ourselves with robots is just something we do. As our main industries moved from field to factory to office, where and how we replace ourselves moved with us.

Should we do it? Heck, we should probably still be tilling a field somewhere with a couple of oxen. Or at least making a cabinet out of actual wood with honest-to-god hand tools. And then we should be writing a letter with pen and paper to send to our friend who lives a 6 day journey from here. 

We're not going to do that, though. We're going to use whatever tools are available to us. It behooves us to learn to use them well so we can make a quality product.

Every time we invent a new tool to do the "heavy lifting" for us, we deskill ourselves in the old ways. We could keep whining about that, or we could just accept that this is what we do, and make a point of learning to use the new tools in a way that keeps us actively engaged in the quality control of the process.

Oh, and have a secret enclave of people who can still write actual sentences with their own brains and hands, for when the solar flare (or the cyber-terrorist EMP) wipes out technology and we need to rebuilt society after the resulting apocalypse. Basically, writing is going to become like knitting and woodwork - a quaint little hobby that will eventually save the human race.

Not that we're worth saving.

The important thing with using a tool that replaces us intellectually is that everyone is on the same page with this – we need to ensure no one reads something written by a machine and assumes a human wrote that.

Eventually, it will be assumed that all copy was written by a machine unless otherwise noted (just like we assume everything we use was made by a machine, even though the vast majority of the things we touch in our lives are still "handmade" by actual people in factories. Very, very poorly paid people in very, very unsafe factories...), but at this point in our evolution it's still the other way around.

So, for now, we still need to insist that any use of Generated AI is "permitted and admitted" – you don't use it when you were told not to, and whenever you do use it, you outline/admit to what you used it for.

My Job Still Doesn't Exist

 I was cleaning up some comments on this blog when one of them lead me to an old post from 2009:

My Job Doesn't Exist

In this post, I talked about how my job is almost entirely made up: I teach people to use things that they only need to use because I told them these things exist and they should use them. In the post I mentioned several tools that no longer exist - I'd completely forgotten they existed, to be honest, and we don't miss them. I wonder how many of the tools I teach people to use today will be forgotten relics of a brief period of time in the near future?

Almost 15 years later, I'm still teaching people to use tools they only need because we tell them they exist, but with slight variations. Instead of "training a unicorn to fly a spaceship", I'm now teaching people what they should now about flying spaceships with unicorns, so they understand the principles and can better adapt to the new spaceships they may encounter in the future and the legendary creatures that might be flying them.

But... 

Teaching transferable skills is all well and good, but - as I have bemoaned many a time - if these skills aren't transferable to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, then what's the good of them?

After the "something that happened", will we need to know how to use a database that uses boolean operators? I doubt it. Will we need a plumber? Yes.

If I run away from this job and move to a quaint sea-side town with a population of 20 farmers, 10 fisher folk and a vet, will these people need me to teach them how to use EndNote? Probably not. Could they do with someone who can make cupcakes and coffee? That's more likely.

What I do isn't real. I don't make anything real.

I need to learn how to bake bread. Bread is real. People will always need bread.

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

I Think it’s Only Fair to Warn You…

 A few years ago I bought a T-Shirt that had the quote “I think it’s only fair to warn you that I am, in fact, a librarian” (from the movie The Librarian) on the front of it.

Unfortunately, I bought a long-sleeved women’s shirt from an American store – completely forgetting that American women aren’t allowed to have arms. Or, if they do have arms, they aren’t allowed to wear clothes. As a result, whenever I put the shirt on, I have difficulty bending my arms and spend most of my time with them hanging limply by my side, like that character from Sesame Street who lost his elbow. Needless to say, I almost never wear it.

This is a shame, because I think I should probably go about my business wearing a suitable warning about my librarianship. I think people need to be warned that I have probably done some research prior to coming here tonight, and therefore have unexpected amounts of information about this topic that I ostensibly have no business knowing.

Take the other night, for example. I was at a Foundations course at my local bouldering club. We went around the table introducing ourselves and saying how much climbing we have done. Most people (except for someone who had been roped into trying it for the first time tonight) had at least six months experience; I’d just finished my two-week trial.

At some point one of the other participants asked a question, and I instinctively answered it. I was closest to her when she asked and the course instructor hadn’t heard her, so I just told her the answer. I watched her face move from “oh, okay…” to “…but wait, why would she know?” and I realised I hadn’t mentioned that I’d been reading up on bouldering in the past month or so and watching YouTube videos about it on and off since the last Olympics. I’m a librarian – if I’m interested in something, I look stuff up.

If I can do one thing to make my life worthwhile, it will be to introduce a second librarian stereotype into the mix. I know we’ll never be able to shift the idea of the crusty, old, cardigan-wearing lady in a dusty old building telling people to “shush”, but in library circles we have a completely different stereotype that I think the media would have fun with if they adopted it: The thirty-something person with green hair and tattoos who has always done pre-reading on every topic and will answer questions you didn’t even ask… even if you didn’t want them to.

Granted, I didn’t get tattoos until my 40s and when I coloured my hair I went purple. I’m also nowhere near hipster enough to truly match the stereotype we have within our circles (maybe I should start wearing a vest?), so I’m not personally going to be the biggest flagship for this stereotype. But that’s neither here nor their.

However, the “cardigan-wearing” thing is a keeper. We really do all have one close at hand.

Shepherd’s Race

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Have you ever had a mistaken meaning for a word or term become something deeply entrenched in your mind, so much that it still means something to you even after you learned you were mistaken?

I’m not talking about clinging to something even though it’s wrong, but rather that your “wrong” idea about what that term meant is something that you still think about, and you still need a word for it, so, for you, that’s what it’s called.

A couple of decades ago I became slightly obsessed with mazes and labyrinths (try to act a little bit surprised – I know this is totally in character for me, but I like to pretend I have hidden depths).

It began with a deep fondness for mazes that I developed while living in Tasmania – home to several maze complexes within a few hours’ drive from my house – and grew into a profound appreciation for labyrinths as both a design concept and a meditation tool over the years.

At one point in my life I dreamed of opening my own maze complex for tourists in Estonia – a land that has surprisingly few tourist mazes, given how whimsical it is. It was going to be glorious: a big maze, a couple of smaller “knots”, a turf maze and at least one proper labyrinth – all surrounded by gardens with “rooms” and statuary everywhere. It would be a game (literally, with a spotter’s card and everything) to see if you could find all of the statues in the complex.

I haven’t entirely given up on that dream…

Early in my exploration of the world of mazes and labyrinths, I came across the term “Shepherd’s Race”, which I thought was the name of a type of maze which served a particular purpose: to allow shepherds to stretch their legs while not going too far from the flock.

It’s actually a name given to a particular turf maze near Nottingham, and a couple of other mazes had very similar names. Shepherds apparently did carve turf mazes, and they no doubt used them to keep mentally and physically active while sitting around watching a bunch of sheep do sheep things in a paddock, but it’s not the name of a type of maze or a type of activity involving mazes, which is what I had erroneously thought.

However, the idea of a “shepherd’s race” being a long exercise track tucked into a small area really captured my imagination when I first “discovered” it, and it has stuck with me ever since. I loved the idea of a labyrinth being an historical treadmill.

If you’re not familiar with the design of labyrinths, they are most often a single track or path that loops around within itself to create a pattern. If it’s a labyrinth, it’s most likely going to be unicursal; you don’t have islands or dead ends, like you do in a maze. Once you enter the path, the only place you are going to go is to the centre. Then, depending on the design, you may have to turn around and go back the way you came to get out again.

Labyrinths are also often just a pattern on the ground. They frequently don’t have high raised walls like a maze, which means you can always see the pattern of the path you are walking on.

This is why they were often used for walking meditation, and you’ll find them in churches and temples. Within a short space, you can walk a “long” distance. Imagine walking a one-kilometre track but staying within a space of a hundred or so metres – and during that whole time you don’t come across any surprises; you know exactly where you’re going, and you can spend the whole time focusing on your cadence and your breath.

Walking a labyrinth as a meditation is a wonderful thing and I recommend you try it if you get the chance.

But back to “shepherd’s race”.

I use this term (or “shepherd’s run”) all the time (mostly in my head) to refer to getting exercise by walking or running a circuitous path that stays within a small area. I’ll sometimes decide I need to go for a walk, but the whether is inclement, so I’ll go to a large store and use the aisles of the shop “as a shepherd’s race”. (So far no one in Bunnings has asked me why I’m walking up every single aisle of the shop at a brisk pace and then turning around and doing it again in the opposite direction. They’ve probably seen much, much weirder things.)

Or I’ll decide to “go for a shepherd’s run” and try to map out a way I can hit as many streets as possible in a single neighbourhood to run several kilometres without going more than a kilometre or so from my starting point.

Even though I know “shepherd’s race” or “shepherd’s run” isn’t actually the term for covering a lot of ground within a short distance by taking a circuitous route, it’s my term for it. I don’t know of another.

I know you can cover a lot of ground in an even shorter physical space by hitting a treadmill in a gym, but this way I actually get to see some change to the scenery. I find a “shepherd’s run” in a “shepherd’s race” is way more interesting than hitting a treadmill any day of the week.

Do me a favour and start using these terms for the same thing I’m using them for. I think the terms (and the concepts) deserve to take off.

P.S. My love of labyrinths has nothing to do with the Labyrinth movie starring David Bowie (which I loved to pieces), as that movie had very little to do with labyrinths, surprisingly. Name one thing you know about labyrinth design as a result of watching Labyrinth. You probably said “something about an oubliette,” but oubliettes are dungeons that can only be accessed through the ceiling. Nothing to do with labyrinths.

One thing you possibly did learn about labyrinth design from Labyrinth, without necessarily noticing, is that some (but not all) labyrinths have a path out from the centre that runs parallel with the start of the path into the labyrinth. ("If she'd 'ave kept on goin' down that way she'd 'ave gone straight to that castle.")

Scrabble as a Cooperative Puzzle

 For as long as I can remember, my mother and I have played card games and board games together, and we've always done it wrong.

Q. What happens when you get two highly non-competitive people to play games together?

A. Everybody wins.

Well, actually nobody wins, but we're okay with that.

Take Scrabble, for example. I understand that you are supposed to pay attention to the numbers on the tiles and the scores written in the squares on the board?

Yeah, we don't do that. We just try to get every letter on the board in the most interesting words we can think of. If that means occasionally using a foreign word, onomatopoeia or initialism, so be it. It's not so much a "game" with a "winner" as a cooperative puzzle. Often, by the end of the game, we'll even turn around the last few tiles so we can all see them and work together to finish the board.

For games where the "winner" is the first person to do something ("you've played out all the cards in your hand! You win!") we'll often just pick up another hand of cards or tiles and keep going. There are still pieces left to play - why would you stop just because someone theoretically "won"?

Our least favourite games are the ones where you basically have to stop when someone wins. So boring.

I don't know if we started doing this because my mother wanted to teach me that winning isn't a big deal (and thus I shouldn't be a sore loser), or if it's actually my fault that we do this because I just wanted to keep playing until we ran out of pieces.

Either way, it's a habit we fell into many, many years ago, and it's my preferred way to play games. This makes it very difficult to play with other people. They care about winning and all that crap, which is incredibly dull. I care about whether I can sneakily get three different spellings of a homophone onto the board.

If you've never played Scrabble as a cooperative puzzle, you really should give it ago. When it's a team sport and everyone is on the same team, it really does change the dynamics of the game completely - for the better I think.

But if you're a competitive person, you probably shouldn't try playing a game with me. I'll lose just for fun, which tends to really annoy people who are genuinely trying to win.

I'm just calling Luxembourg "Idris" from now on

I've started reading City of Bones, and I'm not sure I can cope with the level of stupidity shown by the characters... and maybe the author.

Let's ignore, for a moment, the "plot that is furthered by people doing stupid things" and look, instead, at geography.

According to an early conversation "Idris" is a country that is between Germany and France that "Mundanes" don't know exists. And "There isn't a country between Germany and France, except for Switzerland"...

So "Idris" is Luxembourg? And "Mundane" is just something rude we use to refer to people who lack a basic knowledge of geography?

The argument can be made that a particular character has a terrible grasp of geography - especially if it's the American character. Everyone in the world is happy to accept that an American character would struggle to remember European countries exist. Most of us are pretty sure Americans can only name three European countries at any given time — and sometimes one of those is Genovia.

But when the other character in the conversation supposedly comes from that part of Europe, you'd expect them to say "well, actually, there are a few countries between France and Germany. There's Belgium, Luxembourg, Idris, Switzerland and then Genovia. Perhaps you might wish to purchase an atlas?"

The fact that the guy from Luxembourg... sorry, Idris, said "oh yes, you're right about there being nothing there — but my magical country is the exception!" just makes be think it's the author who might require an atlas.

This is after the "plot furthered by stupidity" thing already made me want to slap people. Look, I don't care how old you are, teenaged people — if you walk into a room that has clearly been freshly ransacked, you should have enough nous to think "I wonder if the bad guys are still here?" and shut up. Just shut up and stop drawing attention to yourself.

I'm only five chapters in. I asked a friend at work today if it gets better, and she said "nope - but the grasp of geography improves slightly". I don't know if continuing with this book will make me more accepting of the stupidity and I'll be able to suspend disbelief, or if I'll just end up flinging the book across the room (which would be awkward, because I'm listening to an audiobook on my phone, and both my phone and my headphones are too expensive to fling).

And, yes, I know: Genovia is between France and Italy, not France and Germany. I was taking liberties for comedic effect.

The Creativity of Weeding

Photo by Kasturi Roy
on Unsplash

When I was studying to become a librarian, I had a part time job as a signwriter’s assistant. A big part of my job – actually, I would say it was one of the biggest parts of my job, was a task called “weeding”.

Weeding involved getting rid of any material that wasn’t part of the sign. I’d carefully strip away the excess vinyl that wasn’t part of the design, so that only the actual design and words were left. Everything else was extraneous. Unnecessary. In fact, if we didn’t get rid of the material we weeded, it would render the sign useless. You wouldn’t be able to see the design or properly read the words.

When I became a librarian, I soon learned that a task called “weeding” was a part of that job, too. Items that were too old, were in poor condition or hadn’t been used enough were earmarked for removal from the collection to free room for new items – or to create spaces for our patrons to use for various purposes (sometimes, in a library, empty space is more useful and more valued than books).

As a liaison librarian in a university, I was only tangentially involved in the weeding process. The resources team had a series of criteria for works that would turn up on the regular weeding spreadsheets. My role involved checking items that had been marked for weeding to see if they needed to be kept or replaced and occasionally scanning through the collection to find superseded editions that were too old to keep, even though they were too well used to turn up on the lists.

While weeding was less central to my role than it had been when I was a signwriter’s assistant, it was still central to the ecosystem of the library. As a team, weeding was a big part of what we did – and an important one. In order to keep the collection healthy, vibrant and relevant to our patrons, we had to have a “healthy” weeding programme.

As much as people freak out at the idea of a library getting rid of books, it’s the same principle as weeding in the signwriter’s workshop – or even weeding in a garden: you have to take out what shouldn’t be there so that it doesn’t detract from or obscure what should be there.

A good library isn’t full of books no one is using. There are some libraries that keep works for historical reasons, and we all work together to make sure we don’t throw out the last copy of something – but we don’t need to keep a book that no one wants to read. And we shouldn’t keep a book that no one wants to read, because a) it will make it harder to find a book you *do* want to read, and b) it means we won’t have space for the new books you might want to read.

But this post isn’t actually about weeding in libraries, it’s about weeding in general.

I briefly mentioned gardening a moment ago. Over the past few years I’ve been getting more interested in gardening, but I don’t come from a gardening background and (between work and family commitments) I keep stupid hours, so I don’t really have the time or know-how to get as into gardening as I want to. Most of the time I’m lucky if I can find the time to weed.

This has been a source of great frustration to me, because I’ve never really seen weeding as gardening. Weeding is a chore – a task. Gardening is a creative process. Weeding is taking plants away, while gardening is about adding plants and growing them… isn’t it?

A few weeks ago I looked at my overgrown and shaggy garden and realised that gardening is a lot like sculpture – the carving-figures-out-of-marble kind of sculpture. To butcher an old adage: you carve a sculpture of a lion by taking away all of the marble that isn’t a lion.

I suddenly realised that a large part of good gardening is weeding (and pruning – which is a kind of weeding, if you think about it). Yes, by all means gardening involves planting and designing, but to a large extent it involves carving away anything that isn’t the garden. Weeding isn’t just a chore that we do because we don’t like weeds. Weeding is something we do to make our gardens “intentional” spaces. We take out what isn’t part of the garden, so that the garden can be revealed.

Not too long ago I read a book written by a Zen garden designer. Now, when I say “not too long ago”, I mean “long enough ago that I’ve forgotten what that book was and who wrote it.” However, I do remember that it was written by someone who designed gardens for Zen Buddhist temples, and I remember that one of the pieces of advice that he gave was to go into the garden and think vary carefully about what needed to be removed. Do you need to sweep the paths? Do you need to prune this particular branch of that particular tree? Do you need to cut the grass over there?

There *is* a kind of creativity in weeding.

When you walk into a space and think of it as a sculpture, you ask yourself, “what needs to be removed so that what remains is improved?” This is absolutely a creative process, and one that can be done with only a few minutes to spare here and there.

It’s also a process that can be applied to so many aspects of our homes, workplaces, jobs and activities. In every domain of our lives, we could benefit from a bit of careful weeding. What is getting in the way of this space being better? Can you see the intentional design, or is too much of what is unintentional getting in the way? Can you strip away something extraneous and unnecessary to improve what remains?