Cross-fertilisation of knowledge

As I surveyed the bookcase, I debated with myself: ‘I really shouldn’t get any more books.’ ‘What’s the point in picking these up? It’s all on the internet anyway.’

I’d picked up various novels I wanted to read, or that I thought my children would want to read at some point.

And I’d returned to the poetry section of my parents’ library after being caught out by my eldest having an English assignment where I knew there was a book on the shelf that would have helped.

Growing up, there was always a book on hand to help with whatever I was doing in school, particularly if it was history, poetry, or economics.

But my children live in a different world. My eldest’s secondary school gives all the pupils iPads and their homework is on Teams. I feel technologically challenged.

I stared at the History Today Companion to British History, a real tome. ‘What is the point?’ I asked myself. They can look up anything in Wikipedia. AI can outline causes and events in seconds.

But, I reasoned, they won’t have the joy of accidental discovery.

They won’t look up Corn Laws and read on the same page about the Roman settlement of Corbridge, the Coritani tribe, or the Cornish Rising of 1497.

When knowledge is neatly packaged up, you can’t see what it is missing. AI is all very clever, but it fools you into thinking you don’t need to look any further. This is ‘the’ answer. Whose version of history are you reading? What are the sources? Who wrote them? Why did they write them? Why that source and not those ones? These are all questions we’re taught to ask in history but that we’re in danger of glossing over.

You might think it doesn’t matter.

But history is written by the victors.

Computers are programmed by people, employed by corporations. And we’ve all seen over the past couple of months how corporations can be a lot more overtly influential than we had given them credit for.

One of my fears about our direction of travel is a world in which books are banned and we’re served ‘truth’ by AI.

I brought the encyclopedia home with me.