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Robots Retrieve Your Books At U. Chicago's $81 Million Library
kkleiner writes "The University of Chicago's new $81 million Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is being referred to as the library of the future. You enter the library and find there are hardly any books, just a large reading room with computers. The library's 3.5 million books are stored inside 35,000 bins stacked within 50 foot tall racks in a massive 5-story chamber underneath the library. When you ask for a book an automated retrieval system involving huge, computer-activated robotic cranes finds the book you want, delivers it to the circulation desk, and eventually puts it back underground when you return it." The age of the personal-shopping library robot is getting closer and closer.
It's called a Kindle...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
We have had one of those at Sonoma State University for about 10 years now.
This is not news at all, there are multiple of this same system all over the country and has been for a few years now. Even my crappy school in Nevada has had the same thing for almost 3 years now.
http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/libraries/kc/about/mars.aspx
Robots are cool.
Wandering the stacks and reading random books is fun.
Going to the location of a book and looking at the books around it for other options is a necessity.
But what I enjoy about say, going to one of the many libraries that my school operates - is having a list of a few books I want to check out, and browsing around where those books are found, finding additional books on the subject. This helps me find further research sources. I'm not sure how common that would be in all programs, but in History, it's quite a bit beneficial, or at least it has been for me...
It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...
We have the same thing at the University of Utah. We've had it for a couple of years now.
This system caters to the individual who knows exactly which book they want, but what about us who like to have an idea, go to the section and browse around? I have frequently gone to the library with a vague idea of what I'm looking for and leaving with books for that topic, related topics and often just something that caught my eye. This "progress" undermines a lot of the value that a library presents.
Besides, if I know exactly what I want, I can use my computer and Amazon to get most things without being inconvenienced with leaving my home or office.
Becoming a librarian has been a pretty crappy career path for some time, involving long education to the M.Sc level only to receive poverty-level wages in many places. Now with mechanical systems, there's ever fewer job opportunities. The workforce at my university library has been heavily reduced in recent years.
Tuition rates are out of control because, for some reason, everyone in the US suddenly needs to go to college. Its a marketing ploy, and its working like a charm.
It's soooo 1980s' there. Robots (FAX) getting books (hardcopy). Way to go Chicago U!
The library cost a hefty $81 million, but the alternative was expanding the old library's capacity - and that was estimated at $67 million. So for $14 million, the university gets a brand new library with all the prestige and sex appeal of this new, high-tech approach with lower operating costs to boot. And anyway, the library's namesakes donated $25million, an amount that was probably increased by the prospect of the donator's getting to slap their name all over this exciting new building. What I'm saying is that this was a no-brainer for the university in terms of cost/benefit.
Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
in about 3 years? Seems a bit ill-conceived.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
One of the benefits of sorted shelves are that you might find something you weren't looking for, but is related to what you were looking for. If I don't know which book is the best book on a subject, I'll just pick one and find it on the shelf, and look at the books near it on the shelf for something that looks appropriate to my level. I don't see how this is possible with a robot system.
There is no future in paper books.
My alma mater (California State University, Northridge) has had one of these for over 15 years (http://library.csun.edu/About/ASRS). Sure it's cool, but why do we care? It's nothing new or groundbreaking.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
It is tempting to chalk this down to colossal stupidity and cluelessness, but that would be a mistake. Such a library can only have been designed by people who never go to libraries. However, as with most governmental or institutional actions that seem carried out by imbeciles, corruption is a far better explanation. Instead of allowing users to browse the stacks directly, examining book after book with related (or even serendipitously unrelated) information, you can now only get the exact book you asked for and will likely have to do it again and again with needless waiting and hit or miss results. This is something that should have been specifically prevented in the design, but then far less than $81 million would have changed hands. This backward and gratuitous use of completely inappropriate, overly elaborate and enormously expensive technology was done not for library users, but by the designers and builders to scam the customer.
All that glitters is not gold.
Hint: Student loans are 1) guaranteed by the government, and 2) securitized. Sound familiar?
This sort of automated book retrieval system has been commonplace for years. The University of British Columbia installed such a system perhaps a decade ago ... and it works beautifully.
yea I go to the library to wander around and get lost a while, but when I was in college that was the last thing I wanted cause I needed material NOW!!!
so I guess it depends on the function of the library, since yea this was a good deal and yea there was a hefty donation I will not go into how Illinois is broke, has a sky high poverty level, and if you find a town tween hours of cornfeilds its 3 farmers doing a circle jerk, and admit it was a good buy for a university
as a public place of knowledge and literature its a total failure, as discovery is half the fun when you are not forced to do a scavenger hunt on a deadline
I am completely unimpressed with any library where I can not browse books.
Having books suggested to me by some algorithm that's been training itself to show me things similar to things I've seen before is not at all the same.
Neither is giving me random crap because I've expressed a distaste for homogenized crap; as I told the designers of the iPod Shuffle the first three times I suggested that they had a perfectly usable UI feedback mechanism for representing menus in the devices audio output: Random Is Not A Feature.
This goes for browsing them by either topically due to horizontal shelf locality, or because of other physical adjacency (above/below/opposite self), or because of route locality (I went down the wrong row/headed to the right row through another, otherwise unrelated, section).
FWIW: I also hate electronic books.
-- Terry
Admittedly, it's not like I have the time (nor really care) to do a cost benefit analysis for the project. The entire thing just seems a bit bloated. University of Chicago is a private institution and they can spend their money however they wish. There will be a point though where the parents/students of the school will look at that library and consider that their money isn't going to a quality education, but pure waste. That "extra" $14 million ould definitely save the parent/student more than a few pennies off tuition over 25 years.
Chimney sweeps and horse shoe men have it even worse!
I like the overall idea, however according to the video, it seems like you still require librarians to sort through a bin of 100 books for the book you requested. I know that this is probably the first automated library of this scale, but if your going to spend the 81 million, you might as well make it totally automated without human interaction.
On a positive note, the library really does look like a library from the future. I would love to go there and read books on my eReader.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
We're a few years away from having e-paper that feels like a book and can hold as many as you need for a couple of weeks. Why does this library need to store more physical copies of printed books? When all is set and done they'll be left with maintaining a useless robot...
Note to self: get a sig.
I went to the Arcada section of the library and there was a guy laying shot and bleeding on the ground. I went to help him and he said "Astral body".
Anyway I had the computer retrieve the "astral body" cartridge. Stupid library didn't have anywhere to play the thing though.
Veramocor
Indeed the long run the robotic library will be cheaper. My alma mater started construction on one just before I graduated and I heard a librarian talking about the new design. Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.
You reach your destination, but alas & alack
You need some compensation to get back in the black
You take the morning paper from the top of the stack
And read the situation from the front to the back
The only job that's open needs a man with a knack
So put it right back in the rack, Jack
Amen. Nothing beats perusing physical media.
The library of the future is . . . the library of the past. Isn't this just the "closed stacks" system? Except with robots? And no hanky-panky in dimly-lit floor 2.5 East?
I am not a crackpot.
I'm am both a graduate student and circulation librarian at Harvard, the biggest library system on the planet. While I can see the benefit of not having to run around such a massive library, especially the torturous process of reshelving returns, one of the benefits of libraries this huge would disappear. One of the great things about humongous libraries is that when you go to get your book, you can look at the other stuff on the same shelf. You'll often find a bunch of other relevant stuff, perhaps even more relevant than the book you came to get. It sounds like this robotic system would totally eliminate this.
What a great way to track what you read, for finding subersives and for the university to sell to marketing companies who can zero in on what you read to help market crap to you that you don't want, but might be susceptible to purchase with well trained psychological profile based marketers. That database they're gonna amass is going to be hella valuable.
What are my books doing at U. Chicago's library?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I bet you won't find it predicted in Astounding back in the 1940s that we'd have robotic fetchers by the year 2010.
Somebody in Chicago invented time travel back in 1940, zipped 70 years forward to see how humans and AI were getting along, saw the library, returned to the time of origin, then destroyed the machine, since the future was too sad to contemplate.
Will also offer *free* electronic copies of ALL their books, to go along with the paper ones.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
At the University of British Columbia, Canada.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruenelf113/3657589909/
I think Joe and Rika Mansueto are going to be upset when they rename it to University of Chicago's Rube Goldberg Library.
This may be a good system if the desired book is known beforehand, but how does a person know what book he wants?
Usually, the tactic employed is called browsing. A person enters a library and proceeds to leaf through many volumes of a given subject until a suitable title (or titles) is found. Needless to say, this system would obviate the whole idea of browsing and make the whole library experience rather pointless.
The ability to freely browsing applies to virtually all shopping ventures and it applies to scholarship as well. Eliminating this ability for the sake of technical expediency is a ridiculous move.
Maybe the responses you're getting are because most people only think of librarians as glorified book shelvers. Those who know better aren't the one's cruising slashdot. Those who know an E-reader isn't a substitute for a librarian also aren't cruising slashdot. That leaves the anti-establishment, if I keep calling everything "buggy whip" people will think I'm cool.
Books bring robots to YOU!
You can get higher packing density by having sliding shelves like we do at Emory (4-6 shelves effectively have a single aisle at a time and the shelves slide to provide access to the desired aisle). That said, one of the greatest advantages of the UChicago system is avoiding improperly shelved books - if a book is used and put back in the wrong place, it is nearly impossible to find in a library of millions of volumes whereas with robotic retrieval system will avoid this. The downside however is that you don't see related books anymore like you would when searching in the stacks yourself. Searching for a Graph Theory or Civil War book might take you past a book that fits your needs even better than the one you were initially looking for.
Quick! Everyone get a student loan, and we'll avoid the S&L bailout of the 80s!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...
You have got to be kidding. This is exactly what Universities should be doing. Finding ways to preserve knowledge and make it available to whomever wants it. Until everything is digitized, this is a perfect way to make those books available in an as efficient a way possible. The students at the U of C are not about getting good grades and passing courses to get good jobs. They are about discovering and creating and investigating things that no one else has thought of yet. It's a research institution, not a tech school. And I wish we had more like it.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The main branch of the NYPL uses the same system, albeit more floors that aren't as tall, and human workers handle pick and place.
An original illustration here, sorry for the ugly url: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PotguXM3PJk/TKh0YeRyQMI/AAAAAAAAF_c/WiOrMXEWdQc/s1600/nyplstacks.jpeg
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
... so I can retrieve them, as well as search, copy (!), and do everything else I can do with data on a computer, from anywhere.
This is hardly unique. Macquarie University's (Sydney, Australia) new library uses this system also. For a more complete list:
http://www.automatedlibrarysystems.com/our-successes.cfm
Pretty much the only reason I'll go to a library for research rather than the web or journals is to browse: find where the books on subject x are, flip through a few or a few dozen, scan indexes and sample writing style until I find a good book on whatever I'm looking for. So, cool as this system undoubtedly is, it pretty much negates the benefits of libraries for me.
nowdays you can predownload cataloging data partially filled out
True, although you could always design a nice "virtual bookshelf" type of interface for browsing titles in software. In fact, most library catalog search engines will show "other titles on the same shelf" by default. For example see this entry for Dune and click on "Browse shelf" to the right of the page.
When manufacturing jobs started disappearing the comments from many were that everything was ok and that service related jobs would take their place, now the service related jobs seem to be going away too (McDonalds last week announced it was replacing cashiers with touch screen kiosks in 40,000 restaurants). What happens now? While I like progress and advancement in technology, it just doesn't seem to be very well thought out, if you eliminate jobs in the name of efficiency eventually you also end up eliminating a sizable portion of the customer base. You can have 100% efficiency but if there is no one left who can afford to buy what your selling your business is going to fail.
it's been so long i've forgotten most of it. but essentially there are a tangle of tables for various parts of a book record, and a bunch of proprietary indexing garbage. hell i even wrote a layer of python to talk to it... it interfaced with a layer of java that itnerfaced to an ODBC driver... anyways. they were using Oracle and Unix as a backend, but i didnt get to play with that part.
the other staff used to tell me that before they bought it, they went through this survey process; all the librarians and staff liked other systems better, but the main dude decided to buy voyager anyways.
oh there is also an article about voyager in 2600, how it keeps records of every database search, by IP address, and it also keeps records of who checked out what, even long after the records should have been purged. Oh, and did you know that thanks to the PAtriot Act, librarians can get national security letters from the FBI to handover records, and then they cannot talk about having gotten them? (conflict of interest.. i uhmm wrote the rant)
... from the Vashta Nerada. Keeping the books securely locked away where those carnivorous fiends cannot escape is probably step 3 in someone's plan...
this might be a cause of why tuition is out of control.
however, you might wonder, why an organization that supposedly has limited budgets is spending money on these projects.
who benefits?
and who benefits when tuition goes up?
i humbly suggest learning about the mortgage market 2000-2008, then realizing the same thing is happening in education; hedge funds are creating a bubble so they can get rich. fuck the students, fuck the social contract. they bubble the student loan market; they securitize the loans, they sell them off to investors. even better; mortgage debt is forgiven in bankruptcy; student loans are not.
if the money comes from the government; the university has no incentive to cut costs... they just tell the students the price will go up. the students get bigger loans from the government, they are too young to understand what it means. the hedgies get rich slicing, dicing and reselling this debt.
and by hedgies, i include the trading desks at 'banks' like Goldman Sachs.
the only people benefiting from tuition hikes are corrupt contractors and banks/hedge funds.
oh well, at least they can still work at best buy or mcdonalds.
oh wait, mcdonalds is automating checkouts too.
well, at least they can still work at the mall selling dippin dots.
it's the ice cream of the future.
Didn't you hear about the shortage? it's been going on for, I don't know, about 15 years now. A huge, massive retirement wave is hitting the librarian industry! You should definitely sign up for an MLS degree, ASAP! There, you can learn psychoanalytic theories about the hermeneutics of student based factors derived classroom application methods, from somebody who has never heard of Linux. Congratulations, you are well on your way to a noble profession, where you will work in a stultifying bureaucracy where any semblance of creativity or independent thought is treated like cancer and irradiated.
Because Sarah Palin, that's why. Because Glenn Beck. Because Creationist Museums where people ride their pet dinosaurs. Because a large chunk of the US actually got excited about the world ending last Saturday. Because .02 cents is not .02 dollars. Because we're fighting two majors wars and a skirmish in three countries most US citizens can't find on a map.
Because everyone gets to vote. Everyone needs to go to college?! If I had my way, college would be free and citizenship would require degrees in history, economics and science. Why on Earth wouldn't we want the electorate in charge of the largest supply of nuclear weapons on the planet to be as well educated as possible?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
are you trying to tell us that the rest of the country is going to follow suit?
Old days:
Step 1: slip into the library bored on a friday night
Step 2: go find books on nuclear weapons, magic mushrooms, bizarre sex acts, medical anomalies, etc. read to your hearts content.
New days:
Step 1. login with your government provided username and password
Step 2. click on the warning notice that says all your activity is monitored and unauthorized activity will be punished
Step 3. search for stuff.
Step 4. try to tell yourself that everything you search for is not being stored in some database somewhere. even though it is.
Step 5. try to tell yourself that the government needs a warrant to pull your records. even though it doesn't.
Step 6. try to tell yourself that the library administrators and university bosses didn't get any kickbacks from the IT vendor, and that the process was fair, efficient, and put the needs of the students first. even though it didn't.
Step 7. search for a book on how the US has become an emasculated, impotent group of yes men and intellectual cowards
people say 'oh they wont track what you get'. uhm yes they will. they do already.
when Alex Jones starts actually making logical sense, you know this country is in trouble.
Spain has something like 40 percent youth unemployment. They just had a bunch of massive protests.
and take that new fangled alien contraption with ye, ye devil.
Another useless feature to add more cost to already un-affordable tuition fees. Is Obama behind this so that tuition can "necessarily skyrocket"?
Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.
That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.
The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Scanning all the books would have been much easier, cheaper and convenient.
Using a robotic warehouse is so last century.
does it cost to retrieve and return one book?
I assume the catalogue is already electronic. Now how about putting it on the Web and getting Mr Delivery (or whatever the local version is) to deliver those books to your doorstep? (And collect them afterward...)
Then again, why not deliver an electronic copy of the book over the Web? Oh wait....
...let's see what you can do now.
Everyone in the US _does_ need to go to college, only some can't afford it, and some aren't smart enough to be able to take advantage of it.
The cure is to bring back manufacturing jobs. A crackerjack welder can make really good money without going to college, as can a good tool and die maker, machinist, electrician, pipefitter, millwright, etc.
But our factories, which create these jobs, are overseas. Why? No, its not high labor rates or unions. It is the 35% Federal income taxes for businesses. Zeroize these taxes, and US manufacturing will take off, make / keep the US as the #1 manufacturer of the planet, and make the US population prosperous again.
How to do this? Pass the Fair Tax. Its that simple. The Fair Tax will create 10 million new jobs in the 1st 2 years, resulting in a 3% unemployment rate. There's no need for this decades-long recession, which is what it's going to be with the current recovery rate of approx 3% GDP growth. One needs a 7% - 8% GDP growth to get out of a recession, but the 3% figure is just status quo.
It's no substitute for the real thing. If you can't browse along the shelves you might as well not visit a library at all.
That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.
The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.
If you're browsing through stacks still, in this day and age, you're doing it wrong. In a world of databases and search functions, it's much more efficient to browse electronically, and request all the books you think are worth investigating. A well written search function, including related books (users who requested this book also requested X) would be much more useful than each individual having to manually perform the same search that 5,10,100 other people might have done.
This is old Technology with new features. The Rand-Triever was installed in libraries across the country in the early 70's. Due to maintenance costs most if not all systems have been pulled.
http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/administration/photos/Randt.html
The Bloomington Indiana public library has had robot store and retrieve since around 1990. Yawn.
Yeah, a good argument!
My parents' personal library weights about 2 tons. There's no way it could be evacuated in time to save it from, say, asteroid strike (they live in a remarkably geologically stable zone).
However, my own library fits a USB thumb drive which I can easily carry with me everywhere. And with the help of my solar charger I can charge my eBook reader (once or twice a week should be enough).
I really hope they have a place like this in the next edition of DeadSpace. Totally dark room, with limited access, and robots screaming back and forth to fetch the requests of people floors above?
Tell me THAT doesn't strike you as survival horror at its finest?
One of the great things about being a UC undergraduate was taking a break from studying and wandering around Regenstein library, stopping and reading on a whim. "Hmm, that looks interesting". Now that sort of serendipity is gone forever.
Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.
Of course it's academic (so to speak), as I haven't been inside a library in years now.
I watched the video and I must say, it doesn't really sound that innovative.
They can't even retrieve each single book automatically, but must get 99 others with? That's a lot of wasted work there.
Also: barcodes? Which century do they live in? Even at our 'conventional' library they have tagged books with RFID so that you can borrow it yourself at a terminal and give it back as easily.
And they do it so they can store the books in 1/7th the space. I didn't think space was such a big problem for the US...
So in my opinion the price tag is a little too high for such a small gain.
I don't think your scenario of a bunch of requests aimed at a particular area of the stacks is even necessary to cause bottlenecks and delays in patrons getting materials from the stacks. There will never be enough robotic book pullers to match the amount of material that can be obtained by individuals walking through the stacks.
I am guessing the UofC has closed stacks otherwise this robotic system wouldn't make sense. Closed stacks, IMHO, suck like a tornado. They eliminate the serendipidous finds that you would only discover when you're looking at a bunch of texts sitting on the shelves. I spent a year at a university that had closed stacks. Doing research for a class assignment sucked when you had to submit a request for a library assistant to fetch the book for you. And you were limited to a small number of books to fetch for each request; If what you wanted from the stacks wasn't there you were out of luck.; the library assistants didn't -- and, not being knowledgable in your field, wouldn't have been able to -- select a reasonable alternate for any of the books that were checked out. When you discovered that the books you requested weren't what you needed you returned to square one. The whole experience reminded me of the early days of computing when one submitted punch cards to the data processing priests who would execute your program for you and, if you were lucky, you'd get 2-3 chances per day to get your code debugged and running.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Government guaranteed loans. Lots of graduates can't find work. Definitely and education bubble. (Though this is a sub-bubble to the Government bubble you guys are inflating.)
Most U.S. corporations that are big enough to hire decent accounting firms and lawyers are already paying far less than 35% in taxes. By some accounts, the average U.S. corporation is paying taxes in the area of 7%. I sure as hell wouldn't mind being taxed at that rate.
Taxes have been lowered on the so-called job creators for ten years now. Where are all the jobs that those lowered taxes were supposed to have created? Any why were there more jobs when taxes were much higher? (Fifty years or so ago, the top tax rate was around 90% and you'd have to work really hard to say that American manufacturing was suffering under those tax rates.) To bring manufacturing jobs back into the U.S., something has to be done to make it economically undesirable to move them overseas. High oil prices do that to some degree but tariffs would do a much better job of that.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You won't be able to use the system without first providing identification. Every item you search for, every book you browse, every book you check out will be tracked and stored forever in a database. Your library history will be regularly sent to the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc..
And what about the latency time involved? Today i can select a book off the shelf at random and browse immediately. If I must wait for the book to be brought to me (even by a machine), what once took seconds now takes minutes.
Something like Google Books is better than a robotic library -its far less expensive and faster. But there's no replacement for a standard, anonymous walk-in library.
This isn't anything new. That big library in France shaped-sorta-like-a-book-with-trees-in-cages does the same thing. (Yes I know its odd to describe a place by its architecture but I did a small case study on it and I haven't had my coffee yet).
And now what will become of the Elephant's Child? Keeping non-robotic entities out of the stacks will serve only to starve it to death.
Exploring the depths of the library stacks is one of the last and more refined civilised expressions of human hunter-gatherer instincts, where one can find even that which she didn't know she was looking for.
Serendipity is at the foundation of discovery and new knowledge. We become less than what we are when it is denied us.
me. --a by-product of public education
Except, when I'm in a library searching for a book, I often run across something sitting on the shelf, that I was not searching for, that is equally or more interesting. The filter bubble comes to the library. God forbid anyone should expand their horizons by reading something they were not originally looking for.
As for robotic personal shoppers, the same thing happens when I'm in a store. I often run across something I like, or something I forgot I needed while looking for something on my list.
Proverbs 21:19
What a shame! 98% of the fun of going to a library is to browse through the stacks, smelling the knowledge as you go! Who knows what you will find as you wander, lost, through those venerable piles of books? Sigh...
I seem to recall robot librarians in an episode of SAC.
As a graduate of the University of Chicago, I'd have to say that, like many things, the perception is very different from reality. I'd say the vast majority of the student body, like at every school, are pretty average. It's not an environment that stirs intellectual discussion. If anything, it's a rather depressing environment where the vast majority of the people *are* obsessed with getting good grades, so they can get a good job or go to a good grad school. Which should be perfectly fine, but I think a lot of students there take it a little too far and feel they need every competitive advantage against people in their classes. It just makes for a very cutthroat environment, where people don't necessarily believe in collaboration or working together.
The amazing research the university is known for is really more the realm of the faculty, who are more focused on their own research and generally look at teaching as a necessary evil they have to deal with in order to continue their research. You're not going to be exposed to these amazing concepts and ideas. You're going to learn what's in the textbook.
I *do* think that some of the liberals arts courses the university offers can be very interesting and probably attracts a slightly different type of student, but outside of that realm, it'll be pretty dry (sciences, math, economics, pre-med, pre-law folks).
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
IIRC, GE got a credit this year!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not only was the library at my university (California state university Northridge) the first to implement this, but my library also housed starfleet academy. Beat THAT http://library.csun.edu/About/ASRS http://library.csun.edu/About/InMedia
Masses of people living on basic income guarantee is a recipe for disaster. What do you expect people to do with their lives if they have no work to do? Watch TV? Surf the Web? Why do you think there are so many more obese people in first-world countries now? We're only beginning to see the consequences.
People were made to be active, to work. People need to earn their living--it's good for them. Without that, people will feel like their lives are meaningless--worse than many already do.
And no, there won't be an explosion of artistic, cultural creativity just because millions of people are "freed" from work. Those people on basic income guarantee aren't the ones who would be creative geniuses, they're the ones who'd be working in factories and flipping burgers. Besides, there's already an overload of "art" and entertainment available--more than anyone can consume.
There is such a thing as too much technology, and we are crossing into that territory now in some fields. It's not good for society as a whole, and it's not good for individual people either.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
thanks dude.
Most jobs are provided by small or family businesses.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.
The new building is right next door to the old building, and will be used to store rarely accessed books. The old building is still in use, and holds several million volumes.
The new glass-and-robots Mansueto Library, with its capacity for 3.5 million books, is right next to the older Regenstein Library, which still has roughly 4 million books in open stacks. Within a five minute walk of these two libraries is the Crerar Science Library with some 1.3 million books in open stacks. The two older "open-stacks" libraries, built in the 70s and 80s, aren't going away anytime soon. The majority of the University of Chicago's collection will therefore continue to be easily browsable by students and faculty alike for decades to come.
The new library will house rarely consulted books and the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of serial volumes in the University's collection - journals and pamphlets which have already been digitized and need only rarely be consulted directly. The Mansueto is therefore more like a stylish reading room on top of a warehouse of rarely-consulted books - remote storage with five-minute retrieval times. http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/05/16/mansueto-library-celebrates-books-in-digital-era/
One thing that instantly comes to mind is that once you have a system where you have to let a computer know what book you wish to browse, it's relatively trivial to require authentication, and thus create a database of what books people simply browse, or are curious about. As always, these kinds of pieces of random seemingly innocent trivia about a person can be ill used by the government, media, and others. (No puns about the data being protected please, I think we're beyond that).
So you browsed Mein Kampf? Does that make you a political science student, a psychopath, or someone who just wanted to get a glimpse about how fucked up the guy really was? Or maybe you just wanted to see how to take over a country by breaking no laws...
Also, what I like about traditional libraries (At least in Finland) is that the librarians showcase their own choices without an agenda to sell sell sell, and that there's actual librarians to talk to, if I wanted to..
The service industry has failed. Just two days ago I went to a fast food restaurant and ordered a cheese burger. Never ordering from them before, I asked what it initially has on it and they said nothing. So I listed what I wanted and I got all those things plus ketchup. I completely hate ketchup; it wasn't supposed to have ketchup. The guy knew English, we weren't having trouble understanding each other. Roughly 40% of my fast food orders come out wrong. That is truly poor service.
I've used kiosks to order food before. They show you all the options you can choose (at least it seems that way) and tell you exactly what you're going to get.
Though I agree the loss of jobs is a concern. As a high school student, I worked as a cashier to support my tropical fish tank. Without the job, I wouldn't have had the fish and all the experience/management skills of keeping them alive that comes with it. I also learned about budgeting my income, something that vastly pays off. I don't have a solution to the job issue.