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FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | Information Today, Inc.

by Ben Johnson, February 13, 2023

Ben Johnson (bjohnson@councilbluffslibrary.org) is the adult services manager at the Council Bluffs Public Library in Iowa.

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Screenshot of article online…

You can ask Google, Alexa, Cortana, Watson, or Siri—but will you be able to ask your local library? A century or so ago, electricity was a new, quasi-magical thing—a novelty with few applications. Back then, nobody could have predicted that it would give rise to telephones, production lines, and microchips. And yet, electricity transformed every industry, including agriculture, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. As a foundational springboard for so many new innovations, that novelty was the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century.

Now, in the 21st century, a new quasi-magical thing has come into our lives: artificial intelligence (AI). And just as it was in the early days of the electronic revolution, we are only beginning to grasp how completely this new technology will transform our daily lives. Nearly all of today’s emerging technologies are built on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated machine learning. Every major technology company is betting on machine learning, hoping to be a player in the coming revolution by developing proprietary machine intelligences to perform tasks that used to require human intelligence.

–from article

Today, our interactions with AI are mostly novel (“Siri, why did the chicken cross the road?”)—and the results crude—but so were the first lightbulbs and photographs.

Source: FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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Redemption for Doctor Watson ‹ CrimeReads

Olivia Rutigliano reads the detective duo as a brilliant double-act, designed by Watson himself.

Published October 29, 2021 By Olivia Rutigliano

Olivia Rutigliano is the Associate Editor of LitHub’s CrimeReads vertical and the Senior Film Writer at LitHub. In addition to Lit Hub, CrimeReads, and Book Marks, her work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham’s Quarterly, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, PBS Television, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate and the Marion E. Ponsford fellow in the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and entertainment.

It’s not easy playing second-fiddle. Think about this for a moment: is there a character in all of Western literature more misunderstood, more defamed than Doctor Watson, the erstwhile sidekick of detective Sherlock Holmes?

So often, in twentieth-century film and television adaptions, Dr. John Watson is represented as a blithering idiot—often old, always naive, and perpetually astonished. He exists in a constant state of amazement; at the very most, providing a contrast that makes Holmes seem even smarter.

This is strange, because, as he is written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Watson could not be more different than this scurrilous remaking. Holmes and Watson meet in 1881, in a laboratory where Holmes is conducting research. Watson, a surgeon, has just returned to London from a stint in Afghanistan as an army doctor. He’s looking for lodgings, and an old friend directs him to Holmes, who is in the same situation. When they meet, Watson finds Holmes fascinating. Holmes finds Watson suitable.

As both a doctor and a war veteran, Watson is in the unique position to appreciate Holmes’s scientific detective work, as well as offer meaningful assistance as needed. In fact, he appreciates it so well that he begins to profile Holmes, which attracts more attention towards Holmes’s business. And he’s young; according to an estimation by Sherlockian scholar William S. Baring-Gould (which has been corroborated by other scholars, including Leslie S. Klinger), Watson is probably only about twenty-nine years old.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item...

Source: Redemption for Doctor Watson ‹ CrimeReads

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Biography: Arthur Conan doyle

Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, where “A Study in Scarlet” was first published

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Doyles were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family. Charles Altamont Doyle, Arthur’s father, a chronic alcoholic, was a moderately successful artist, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note.

At the age of twenty-two, Charles had married Mary Foley, a vivacious and well educated young woman of seventeen. Mary Doyle had a passion for books and was a master storyteller. Her son Arthur wrote of his mother’s gift of “sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper” when she reached the culminating point of a story. There was little money in the family and even less harmony on account of his father’s excesses and erratic behaviour.

Arthur’s touching description of his mother’s beneficial influence is also poignantly described in his autobiography, “In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.”

Editor’s Note: See a recent find, Radio plays of Holmes & Watson on Spotify… https://open.spotify.com/album/1gtX8EOWFFkauVx0BGN9Nh

Source: Biography, Arthur Conan Doyle