librarypunk - 093 - Desk Set (1957)

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

This week we’re doing the other library school movie, Desk Set. But first, we solve the eternal war between goths and librarians by talking about the Mütter Museum’s changes. Then we get into AI, automation, and sexy library shenanigans.  Media mentioned Mütter Museum: https://www.inquirer.com/news/mutter-museum-oddities-review-new-plan-20230603.html  Knott Malone, "Imagining information retrieval in the library: Desk Set in historical context," in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 14-22, July-Sept. 2002, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2002.1024759. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1024759 Desk set revisited: Reference librarians, reality, & research systems' design (1995) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0099133395901450

I did a dumb rainbow capitalism at the store yesterday, and I bought the gay beer. I wanted beer, and I was like, you know what? I'm going to get the gay kind. Rip it and rip it. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. Budlight's good. Yeah, that's fine. Macro brews or macro for a reason.

Yeah, like, I like light beer or two. Like, I like Pilsners and stuff like this. I'm like, this is fine. IPAs are gross. I hate IPAs. If you like IPAs, fuck you. It's the same industry that tries to sell you on bedfellers. frames and and other shit you don't need.

Yeah, is it the gay beer or is it's a trans beer? Have we is this is about a trans lady who was holding it and they got mad, right? Yes, she's trans. Yes, she's homophobic. What? It's a trans beer, but not the gay beer. Yeah, no. The homophobic trans mask got her buttliffic.

You can't imagine. Happy pride, baby. I'm Justin. I'm a thinking computer, a learning machine. My pronouns are he him. I'm Sadie, otherwise known as Emmerich. My pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay.

I'm a palindrome that's numerically significant. And my pronouns are he him. And we're all goths. Yes. I'm bringing in some industrial music today. You got some coil. You got some Neubatten. No, I got it.

I got it. So we're going to do movie night. We're doing movie night, but we're going to talk about. desk set because that's in the title of the episode. But first, we have a new segment. Mota Museum. Keep mutter weird, everybody. Discourse is happening about museums.

And it's all based around like one article and I can't find anything else. So it's early days. We really got on the train for this. I saw some tweets this morning kind of like, okay, yes, there is nuance. Yes. People kind of walk in back. a little bit. Like, okay, yeah.

Okay, there, okay, yes, there are 50 unrepatriated indigenous remains. Okay, yes, that is important to deal with. Okay. That's bad. But keep motor weird. So it is our sacred duty as goth librarians. Yes. We are the only ones equipped to discuss this issue.

Mm-hmm. Totally not indigenous people at all. No. Goths v. librarians. Yeah, and we're both. What was it someone

said? Mean Goths versus librarian. Mean goth people. People are really fucking spouting off about this. It's really fun. No, what it is is it's, it's cringe goth gen X people

versus people with ethics. Is what this actually is. Hmm. There goes half our listenership. Sorry. Sorry, GenX gotts. Get out of here, Pat and Oswald. I mean, well, he went to William and Mary, so as a fellow alum, I can tell him to go fuck off and it's fine.

Todd Howard as well. Yeah, Patton's fine. He's a cool guy. Come on the show. Yeah, we should. The Motor Museum is going to be all about health and wellness and being alive now and not an Atlas Obscura article made flesh. And all the gotts in the world are mad about it. Although, there's my whole thing about this article is the part where it says, not death, is

not in quotes, right? Some of the things that are attributed to the leadership are the parts that are not in quotes in the article. And this happens at like very specific points in the article several times where I'm like, no, this is where I want them to comment. I want to know actually what the leadership is thinking on this specific point. And that's always the point where they couldn't get a comment. Yeah, because like I got the sense that the, that they were uncomfortable with it kind of being open to the public. And that like if it, when it was just for physicians, they didn't need to actually do their job as a museum and do like curatorial statements and put context you could just have body parts laying around and physicians and like students can come in

and be like, oh, okay, I'm learning and not the plebs, the unwashed public who just like cool dead things because that's human nature. We like oddities, right? And I think there's a way to do that ethically, you know, repatriate the indigenous remains, but like they kept saying just human remains in this and that they were removing anything. that was the human remains from online and no one could look at the human remains. And I'm like, that's your whole museum, basically. But like, the display of human remains in and of itself is not unethical is the thing here. And I think they're conflating people being rightfully upset about

the indigenous remains that they had not repatriated, as well as some of the other examples of remains where the wishes of the person were not respected by the fact of them being in that museum, I'm like the person who wished their remains to be at sea so that their body could be studied scientifically. That is all valid criticism. But I feel like they're taking that and just going, oh, no, human remains, getting rid of it. We don't want to be canceled because this is actually fearmongering about cancel culture is what this all is. Oh, well, we're so afraid of being canceled that we're being forced to do all of this stuff by the woke left cancel mob. And it's like, I wonder though, if it's.

If it's not just the woke left can't like cancel mob because like the thing that stood out to me was the quote that was like it's very disrespectful and disturbing that there are fetuses and jars, right? And I'm like that sounds like that sounds like a Republican. Like I'm going to stand on a street corner and show you pictures of things that aren't actually human babies and claim they are. But like God forbid you actually put some donated people donated feet. this is where somebody can see, you know. Right, like the person who donated it as a way to, like, give it context and purpose and meaning to this experience that happened to them so that people could learn from it. Like, and also, that's your fucking job as someone who works in a museum is to give fucking curatorial statements and context. That's your fucking job.

You just don't put shit on a display and go, here you go. Yeah, this is a Ripley's, like, this is not Ripley's. It's not supposed to be. You work in a museum. Your whole fucking job as a museum person is like give context to this shit. That's what you do. Well, yeah. And like also.

Gay beer and be mad. What Justin was saying in like in the chat earlier, like I can kind of see both sides of this. Like I can see them being like we want to be more than an auditing museum. We want to go back more towards like the medical roots of things instead of just being here for things people to gock at, which like, whatever, that's fine if that's your thing. Like, absolutely. There's nothing wrong with gawking and having things to gawk at, right? But again, some of the comments from people who didn't want it closed sounded very much like, I've seen this happen with friends groups before where a library will, something will happen with a library and it'll be

actually moving it forward. And then the friends group is like, we cannot allow this to happen. And we're the backbone of this library. And we're like, what about like, know, all of the people that spend 50, you know, 40 to 50 hours a week here and, like, think that this is actually going to be a really good change for their, their environment. What about that? Yeah. And just like, you know, it's the people don't like change thing. So therefore, if they don't like the change that's happening, it's destroying the soul of whatever the thing is. And I feel like there's just a lot, there's a lot going on here. Yeah. Like, I think it's a mistake to move it away from the, like, cool, like, weird death.

I think it's a mistake to move it away from that of it being the sort of like, let's learn about all of these like oddities around like the human body and death and all this stuff. Because it's like it to see that in the human body like normalizes it. Like, oh, we have variants in our bodies. And that's like it's cool to see and it like makes you face your immortality, which is always a good thing. getting Buddhist about this, right? Like, it's good for that to be normalized. Could there be a way that that changes going forward that does move it in a good direction?

Absolutely. I think moving it away from being about, quote, death and towards, quote, health, I think that's stupid, but quite frankly, because they are right that that's losing a revenue stream, like to be capitalist about it. Like, that's losing a revenue stream. You're not going to get Atlas obscure articles written about you

if you're about wellness and yoga and shit. But there's enough of that shit going around, right? Yeah. Like there's a way that they could go forward respectfully while keeping the sort of soul of what everyone likes this museum to be without being insensitive and without just being Ripley's, believe it or not, is my take. Yeah. Well, what Sadie was saying about the people who are there, like, all the time.

A lot of the people quoted was like a board member, a fellow assistant director on a movie that they were screening, like not people who work there full. time because a lot of those people quit well eight out of 50 i mean so i put that under genuine it's a lot i put it under genuine problems so like yeah the the leadership is doing stuff quickly and not explaining it and that seems and they seem very reactive and risk averse which is genuine like leadership problem like yeah it's the risk aversion thing yeah not explaining your decisions is bad leadership like it's it's what i call like follow ship like you're like well you know the board said, I have to do this, so now I do it. And it's, you know, it's like a university president.

Like, they just wait for the governor to tell them what to do. Yeah. And so it's, you know, you're like, okay, well, what's your job then? So it's their job to explain shit. Yeah. Well, in a staff exodus, I think is kind of normal after a change in leadership in a lot of ways, too. Yeah. Like, either because the leadership is, is bad and people are bailing because they don't want to work there anymore or maybe the staff were bad and the leadership is good now getting you know helping remove some people that probably shouldn't have been there anymore like i've seen it both ways so like yeah buying out retirements yeah exactly like the very fact that people are leaving within a certain period of time of getting new leadership it indicates nothing about the actual issue of the article to

begin with it could be for any other reason right that's fair it could also just be like Bad timing. Yeah. Yeah, it can just happen. Like, yeah. It's only, it's not a statistically significant number of people. Like, it's eight out of 50 people. Like, it happens.

Like, yeah. But yeah, there's some stuff that just seems very normal and sensible, like, taking down YouTube videos and being like, we're going to review them. And it's like, it sounds like they're deleted, but a lot of it could just be not public. Yeah, it sounds like they're, and they might just be saying, oh, they're under review just to cover their asses and not get people mad. Yeah, could be either way. But I think it is sensible to, because of all of the human remains that are on display right now, maybe they don't know which ones are like the unrepatriated ones or the ones that like maybe. What it sounds like is they have no clue.

Right. And so in that instance, it makes sense then that they would take things down to review them temporarily. I think the mistake would be to write off showing all human remains altogether just because they think that it's insensitive across the board. Yeah, which isn't a thing they said. That was the thing the article speculated. Yeah. But viewers may not see any pictures of human ravines in this database, unlike the interactive online exhibit. That's pure speculation.

That's like not a quote. Oh, I thought it, um, the may not as as in will not, right. I read it like, I read that sentence like four times before I got what they were saying. Oh. It was speculation and not, it's not a defendant. But you're reading it as might not. Yeah. Instead of will not.

Yeah. And also. building like a database of images that you build exhibits on top of, that's what I would do. Yeah. That's what I have done at my job. Get an Omeca thing going. Yeah. It sounds basically like they're building an Omeca as a catalog and then they'll build exhibits

on top of it. Which sounds really reasonable. Yeah. So we should do. And also it sounds like they don't know the provenance of anything, which is like real, a real problem for museums all the time. Like no one knows where shit comes from. Which I think is a good opportunity for.

openly talking about that. Like, I don't like... Yeah, they fucked up the communication. Yeah, they should repatriate what they know that they can repatriate. And otherwise, I think they should do something in their curation and their statements and their displays and their exhibits that talks about, we don't know X, Y, Z. So instead of, like, I talk about this like with cataloging, instead of the politics of correction, right? So instead of correcting, like, erasing and obisicating, reckoning. reckoning with and being open about it and actually talking about it because that in and of itself

is really educational and encourages viewers or visitors of the museum to think about, oh, you know, like the history and the legacy of the things that they're looking at and what that means in like political contexts and stuff. Like that's what I would do. But I tend to not be a fan of correction as a politic just because of how often it's used to obiscape. That would be where I would go with this. But I guess in like a capitalist like neolib since I can see why they would just go like, nope, fuck it. And like starfresh, like I could see, like I understand why they're doing what they're doing,

but I don't agree with it. But all the the Gen X cringe goths need to stop being cringe as well. Can you impale me, please, please impale me? What's it from? What? It's from preserving worlds. I didn't get to use it. No, I was like, is this some new anime you're watching?

No. I'm a bad darnie. Is it Catherine Hepburn time now? Yeah, so that was... All right, close enough that. We're not gossip anymore. All right, now... I don't get your cardigans.

Yes, now we are... Oh, my God. I got like a 50s. Cheeky little like Doris Day. I am a Wabbit. Yeah, that works. Yeah. And it's a movie about bunnies.

It's true. Her name is Bunny Watson, which is a tight name. That's good. Yeah. Bunny, of course, being a shortening of the name Rabbit. So I've never seen this movie and no one told me it was good. I just thought it was like. Yeah, it's great.

Yeah. Yeah, no. It's the movie people see, but it's. Yeah, like in when I was in grad school, like last day of one of my classes, we watched, like, a few scenes of this one. We didn't watch the whole thing. Because we wouldn't have had time. It's almost two hours long.

But we watched a couple clips of it. I was like, this shit rules. Because Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, baby. It's a Tracy Hepburn joint. Like, come on. It's always going to slap when you got Tracy and Hepburn together. They were married. And it's like probably a lavender marriage because, you know,

Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. They weren't married. Yes, they were. No, they were together for a really long time, but he was actually married until his death to a completely other woman. Oh, that's right. I was just reading the whole. They were having an affair. That's right.

Yeah. Sorry. I stayed up until past midnight reading the article about Catherine Hepford. She's great. I love her. She's a little misogynist, but, you know, she made, she wore some really great pants. And that makes up for it a little bit. I prefer her stuff with Carrie Graham, but that's my own personal.

Bringing up, baby. Oh, hell yeah. I own the criteria they're bringing up, baby. I had actually never seen any Catherine Hepburn movies until I got with wife. And they were like, I can't believe you haven't seen Bringing Up Baby and Philadelphia Story. I think are the ones. Philadelphia story is the most romantic movie that's ever been made. Like, they're also really good at the, what is it, the transatlantean accent. Like, we're right y'all, aren't we?

Busts that out when they like want to freak me out for a second. I'm like, who did you become the leopard? What is? I... What have curriculum were in this? It would have made it ten times better. That's true of every movie. Yeah, I, uh, I knew Spencer Tracy.

He's in one of my other favorite movies. Yeah. The one about the teaching evolution in school. He's a lawyer representing the teacher. Yeah, Spencer Tracy's great. And they do the southern gentleman lawyer stuff. It's real fun. Yeah.

They're ham and it. up getting up suspenders. Spencer Tracy, baby. So this movie came out in 1957. It is, yeah, it's about NBC, but they don't say it's NBC. It's a big commercial for IBM. Yeah, the movie's a big commercial for IBM. So it's about a corporate reference department library that is mainly for trivia.

Yeah, they answer the same question a lot. I actually had a boss who worked in a newsroom library. corporate librarianship for a long time in New York. I kind of wanted to call her up and be like, did you ever see Desks Up? Is that you? She very much has the vibe. I love how gossipy they were.

They were so catty. Yeah. This movie is very fun. It seems like some scenes are almost improved where they're just like goofing around. Everyone in this movie fucks. Yes. They say sexy at one point. Like the one dude calls Catherine Hepburn sex.

at one point. I was like, what year is... Gasp. 1957. And there, the, uh, Spencer Tracy is a, oh, what was it? A methods engineer or efficiency. Efficiency expert.

Yeah. And so, yeah, so his job is to, to computerize things. This is the 1950s. So it's, uh, literally when IBM is just switching from government contracts to commercial contracts. So they're making, uh, the mark three.

and selling it to various companies. I think they're making something small. I was brushing up on my history of this, because this is some stuff I had, I learned in like library school, like Univac and stuff like that. Yeah. Which I think is probably most people's frame of reference

because Univac was like a big deal when the Census Bureau sentus bought one in 1951, like a million dollars. That's a lot in 1951. Probably. So he's hanging out to learn how the library works so that he can build a computer that will magically, like, digest books. I don't, it's not explained how.

Don't worry about it. It's AI. Yeah, it's, it's chat GPT. You could just do this with chat GPT and it's like, yeah, it literally just would be the same movie. Yeah. And I'm, I'll talk about that at the end, but. Oh, yeah. The librarians are all fun.

Everyone's getting smacked on the ass. Several ass smacks for the girls. Getting drunk at work on champagne. Very drunk. They're drinking for hours. I'm proud of them. Through three bottles of champagne in that same afternoon. It's a lot.

Good for them. But anyway, Bunny is dating her boss and he's pain in the ass. We're not supposed to like him from the beginning. He's been leading her on for six, seven years. And so Spencer Tracy's character is a lot more fun. But he starts off by taking her up on the roof in like winter and then grilling her. And turns out she has like a mind palace like Sherlock. He like negs her.

Yeah. He's like, now this one's gonna be tricky. He's like a pickup artist. He's like nagging her. And they're really into like the way that her like, her magic librarian powers are like that she like automatically counts how long words are. And then uses that number to like make other connections for like the answer and stuff. She does a bunch of like cool librarian numerology.

I think she's neurodivergent. She knows a lot about trains. Yeah. Yeah. I associate a lot of things with a lot of other things. I think she says something like that, like three times in the movie. And I'm like, okay, so like you have a special interest. Yes.

I kind of wanted to get a clip because it's supposed to be because like her teeth are chattering. But the way she's answering like the questions is like, so the first one is a mathematical question. Oh, do you want celery and olives? celery and olives and she goes three celery four olives and he goes that's not the question she goes oh but it's like not a joke I just thought it was a very dry joke because I laughed but

I wasn't sure I mean probably was but delivery is like spot fucking on she's so good and they play so well off each other it's so obvious that they're fucking in real life it makes it really good to watch them together I really

appreciated how they're both just utterly fucking oddballs. It's so good. And like it's, that's, that's why they like worked and like why they got each other, which like I was just like, yes, show me the older oddballs falling in love and they're like 50s, please. Like I was really like, because the young boss is like, I think he's like younger than she is. Which like you go.

Yeah. And like she turns around and chooses like the older man. The old. I just, I was just like, this is kind of progressive in that sense for this, for the 1950s. Like, kind of a feminist film in a very basic kind of reductionist feminist sense, but like in multiple ways. Yeah. Because I mean, it's definitely about like every woman, none of the women are married. And there are, there's only one who's really like obviously younger.

They all have like dedicated careers. They're all, you know, when they think they're fired, they're all like, well, we're going to get new jobs, obviously. So it'll be a shame we can't. work together, but like, you know, we're all going to obviously be on the job market. I don't like cats. I like men. Was a great line. Talking about them moving in together with their old spinsters. If she doesn't get married, we can get a cat. I don't like cats. I like men. And so do you. And so do you. You don't like pussy. I love that character. You like men. Yeah, she was the best. Yeah. You don't see any

women in senior admin, obviously, it's still the 50s. But yeah, it is like subversive in certain ways. She finally gets proposed to and turns it down because she doesn't want to leave her job. So she's like, I'm not, you know, she's not going to upset her whole life. And it wasn't even just like her job. It was like she also felt connection to the people she worked with. And that could be red as some like, you know, vocational awe like stuff. But it could also be shown as like workplace solidarity, right? Like, you don't just abandon. Like you can also, you can obviously leave your job at any time. you do not owe it to your job to do anything. But like she was talking about like her connection to the people she worked with

as like the really important thing. Like the girls. Like it wasn't a boss or anything. Like she cared about the her people she directly worked with every day. I was like, you should unionize. You should unionize. That scene kind of like and I just watched the end of it because I fell asleep last night

and couldn't finish it. But like that whole scene just made me go. Oh, he never. realized she was autistic. Like, you know, because like he comes in and he's like, I got promoted, you know, to vice president of the West Coast. So we're moving out to California. Next Tuesday, we'll get married. We'll have our own house, you know, which all of this stuff, which usually sound great. And she very obviously, at least to me, is like, we were going to get married and not have children. And I wasn't going to have to be like a corporate like housewife. I was going to

keep my job because we both work here. Like, to me, it was like very obvious, like, not what she had planned at all. And she had just realized that she had already preconstructed it all in her brain and never actually said any of it out loud to him because he never actually showed any commitment before that point. So. Right. Because she had talked about like, what about this? What about like earlier in the film?

She'd be like, but what about housing? What about kids? He's like, oh, people in love, they don't care about that. They don't plan about that. Like, he was originally writing off. any sort of planning. And then all of a sudden, he just springs this on her. She's like, wait, no.

But the planning. Oh, where you're going to live and the job you work and how you make your money and your independence. Those things don't actually matter when you're getting married. I was like, I don't think you know this woman at all, bro. Brough. I loved her giant plant that she was worried about when she got fired. Like, what am I going to do with my philodendron?

It's giant. Take it on the bus. Yeah. Pay an extra fare. that's alive. The Lexington Avenue bus. A lot of this movie is like a rom-com. There's a caught in the rain scene with her and Spencer Tracy

and they have to go into her apartment where he puts his shoes in the oven and forgets about his shoes in the oven. And then her boyfriend comes back because his flight gets canceled and then he has a soul. But Spencer Tracy's just loving it. He's just like

sitting there like, oh, don't worry about it. It's perfectly yeah, you should call a head next time. He's just, he, he's like this in like the other movie that I like, he's just like, oh, don't worry about me. I'm just going to sit here and eat fried chicken. He does that in that movie too. Yeah. No, he's like, I'm going to go get, I'm going to go get like dessert. Like, y'all can have your lover's spat. I'm going to go get dessert out of your freezer

wearing the embroidered bathrobe that you got. By the way, your, by the way, your kitchen's almost on fire. You need a new. like ventilator and it's like no your shoes are in there bra you just walking around barefoot this was a fun movie it's so good it's so weird yeah it's like really weird yeah this is a good like era of movies where there's like there's a conservatism to some movies but there's also a lot of like movies that are just kind of going for it politically in a lot of ways but i mean this movie is again like we said like a big popularization there's actually an article that i had in the notes, imagining information retrieval in the library.

And that kind of talks about how people in the popular media saw computers and, what was it, cybernetics, the interplay of humans and machines. And it was sort of a big pitch of, yeah, well, whatever it was. Yeah, cybernetics is like systems theory, like feedback loops and stuff. It's like predates computers. It was, yeah, I can't remember. I don't have the article open because I reboot my computer. popular ideas about computers and are they going to take jobs or are we going to interact with them in different ways? Are they going to free up labor? And that was kind of the whole sales pitch for IBM at that point in the 50s. Yeah. And that's what this movie is about. This is about like automation versus should we be Luddites, basically. Like when do we smash the looms and when do we accept automation? And there's kind of a point in the movie that I didn't really get at the beginning.

I kind of rewatched the beginning of the movie to catch it. But the whole reason Spencer Tracy's character is not giving them information about their job security is because there's a merger coming up with another network. And the whole thing they're saying don't tell them about is the merger because they don't want the stock for the other company to go up while the merger is happening. So he's not allowed to tell them that their jobs are actually safe. Once the merger happens, they're actually going to expand the department. He kind of has to let miscommunications happen and let them get mad at him because he's not allowed to say because he's explicitly told he can't say anything to them about the thing. So you have to go back and watch the beginning again to catch that. I really like how they just like handwaved the whole coating of the machine thing.

Yeah. We fed it all of the information that's in this reference department. And I'm just like, and how many man hours did that take and who was the one punching those cards so you could feed it into this machine? Yeah. Like did you get the chick from NASA to do that? that for you. Yeah. It's just kind of crafting up like, this is Hamlet?

And I'm like, is it though? Is it? It's like, it's like 30 scantrons. Yeah. It's like, it's been two weeks. How did you get this whole ass department into this machine in two weeks? Like, unless. And does voice to text.

Hemorrhock is very smart. Yeah. Thinking computer. A learning machine. Electronic brain. Was it giant brains is kind of the, apparently like a real phrase that was used around that time. It's giant brains. And I found it interesting that they kept calling it

a she and it's like a servant machine and it's like feminized in the way that Siri, unless you go into the settings and change it, has a female voice and Alexa has a female voice. Cortana is a wife.

Yeah. Like we we code quote like servant technology as feminine. Yeah. Well, if you could fuck when you could get the nurturing that you never got from your mother. I mean, it's basically a love triangle between not just her and the two dudes,

but her, Spencer Tracy, and the machine. Because at the end, she's like, you love that machine more than I do, more than you love me. Like, that will always come first. And he's like, bullshit. And then she's like, what if I destroy it right now? And he's like, fine, do it. And then she smashes the fucking looms. And he's like, see, it's fine.

I twitch. Okay, it'll just take me a second to fix it. Like, like, she's right. like this feminine coded machine is also quote a threat to their relationship. And he, yeah. I was going to say, I like the moment where he like the machine, the Emirac down in payroll fucked up and sent everybody pink slips. He goes, well, I better go down there and see like what payroll's up to like go fix

that machine. And as he's leaving, he sees the boyfriend stroll back in carrying roses and stance there in the hallway. And you can just see it on his. face, do I go take care of this other machine? Or do I go back in there and sabotage his shit? Like, I have been doing this whole movie. And he goes, I'm going to go sabotage his shit.

And I'm like, yes, choose the woman. The machine will still be there. But yeah, I was just like, this is going to come up later, I can tell. Smash the Looms for Love. Smash the Looms for Love. And Smithers is waiting outside watching. Smithers. Sorry.

Mother. Oh, mother. When they said Smithers, I was like, I wonder if Smithers was named after this character. I think IBM's Watson is named after this character. After Bunny, yeah. Yeah. And not just Watson from Sherlock Holmes. Yeah.

Which I'm assuming she's named after. Maybe. I'm actually reading a book right now for Left Page called Homodeus. It was written in 2015. It's a pop history book. It's really bad. Oh, yes. I've heard tell about this.

Yeah. And when I brought up Cortana, that reminded me in the book, he's like, Microsoft is making an AI called Cortana. And what if you could talk to Windows and it'll know your appointments and it'll know your schedule and it'll answer your emails for you? And it took like five years after that before even it got the auto suggesting outlook that's like, follow up with this person. Like, oh, yeah, thank you. Which is a great feature, by the way. Yeah, that's the only good feature they've rolled out. The rest of this spyware shit. How many emails did you send this week? Fuck you. Turn that off. But the, hey, maybe follow up this person.

I'm like, you're right, I should. Yeah, those are good. Does y'all know that in teams you can turn on like a speaker? God, what is it like a speaking advisor that'll tell you how many ums and aaws you utter when you talk and like all of this stuff? And I'm like, why would you do that to yourself? Kill it. Smash it.

Yeah. I mean, if you, if you just, just record yourself talking, you'll, you'll fix how you talk. That's all you got to do. I did this with a tape recorder when I was like 11. I was like, that's what I sound like. Yeah. Yeah. When you realize what your, your ticks are, mine is and whatnot, by the way. I've learned. Mine is ending sentences with, uh, so, and not continuing. I was, yeah, constantly starting sentences with so. I, I, I, I, I, I develop new ones over time and I catch them. But that Homo Deus book is very much like scaremongering about AI. And part of what I'm tying that book into is what's been going on recently in the past few months of like the AI scaremongering industry, which is very much like, AI is a bigger threat than nukes. And it's like, how? It's like, well, they could make us fire nukes. I'm like, then it's not a bigger threat.

The nukes is it. And so the whole thing is about... The fucking basilisk isn't real. Yeah. Terrifying the governments of the world into letting them write their own regulations. That would say, you have to give people a license to do AI, and you should give it to us five companies.

And it's a good strategy because it's cheap. You don't have to buy off people to do regulatory capture. But that's kind of the consensus is like, this is just regulatory. It's just people trying to get you freaked out about chat GPT so they can write some laws that protect their industries. Yeah, like one of my fall, I think in August jobs I have like projects I have to do at work. And so researching it over the summer is helping my institution like develop a policy around AI because students are starting to use it to submit things and getting caught. but then also some faculty are encouraging students to use it for certain types of assignments.

And in those instances, they're actually good uses of it, I will say. It's like there's a whole lot of like, my task is to just be like, okay, here's what's actually AI. And it's not scary. And so here's what you need to know about it. Okay, now you can make informed decisions. Here's also like the political and labor context around AI that should help inform the decisions you make about whether or not to tell students to use it or to,

accept work made using it or et cetera, et cetera. Like, I feel like a lot of our, like, whether you are pro or anti or neutral AI, I feel like the important step we should all be taking. And I feel like this movie is kind of like a good example of that is just like showing that it's really not as scary or smart as people are making it out to be. Show the flaws in the system. Fuck with it. Sabotage it a bit.

And then show where it's actually useful. and then you can go from there. At the end part of her sabotage is like trolling it so that it spits out like a million stands along poem that she knows by heart and is reciting along with it. And I was like, Queen, you go, Catherine. It's in her mind palace. It's in her mind palace, exactly, because she's just Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, she's BBC Sherlock.

Yes, but way better. The show sucks. But she like shows the flaw in the machine. And then at the end, actually does use it to ask a question, which is where the advertisement, the commercial, the commercial of this movie is, is her, the big skeptical one, actually using it,

and it actually asking her a follow-up question, it does a reference interview on her, and then she's like, good girl, and then that's the glowing endorsement of the machine, is that she asks it, well, how much does the Earthway? And it asks her with or without people on it, which a machine would never ask

because it wouldn't know to ask that, right? And they would have had to feed it the data. Exactly. So it would just spit out whatever data it had. Yeah. Yeah. So that sort of, I feel like this movie is like a good way to approach AI is showing just really that this is just statistics is really what machine learning and language models and whatnot is. It's just statistics.

It's just ones and zeros. Yeah. And there are genuine uses for it. And also there are political decisions we should be making about those legitimate uses. like, okay, if there are legitimate uses, do we then still, do we use them or do we choose not to use them and smash the mills or looms or whatever it is that the Luddites did? Because it was like, not that the tech itself was bad, but that it was going to be weaponized against them as an active threat to their employment, which also we see in the film we think is happening because they all get fired. And then the one lady whose job it is to do the prompts basically is the only one not fired. Yeah.

Premort. She also knows, I think she knows about the merger. So she knows they're not getting fired. And then she's confused why they're making her answer the phone. I think she can't do because she's got phone anxiety in the 50s. Don't be a reference library if you have phone anxiety. I can't answer the phone. I have misophonia in the 50s.

I have 50s misophonia. She's also a huge jerk to them when she first beats them. But they are all very drunk also. And they're also very catty and gossipy. They are great. And it's an awful. work environment. I was going to say also they do have a union.

There is a line where they say, can the machine replace us? And it says, oh, yeah, she's down at the union office asking already. I miss that line. We stand a unionized library workforce. Because, yeah, they're communications workers, so CWA probably. Now, are they librarians? Yeah, corporate librarians. Okay.

I didn't know if we had gotten like conference. as to like what their job title. I don't think it's in their job titles, but. Or if they're called librarians or if they're like researchers. But I mean, they're called reference. Yeah, I think they're called reference and research interchangeably. Yeah. So I wasn't sure if this was explicit like these are reference librarians or.

But she did say she went to library school. Did she? I missed that too. Okay. Which was like a summer course back then. I must have missed everything. Okay. It was early in the movie.

It was when they were talking in the lobby before they do the grilling test. Because that's like another thing I think is really valuable about this film is showing just how much reference services have changed. Like what is the point of reference librarianship? And because like this is people calling and asking trivia questions and then they off the top of their head or very quickly can give them the answer to trivia questions. Stuff you would Google. Yeah, like, did search engines change? Because it's like now, unless someone was in a hurry, or if it like really wasn't worth me showing them how to do it, I would never just tell someone. Like I wouldn't be, one, I wouldn't be asked trivia questions, but also I wouldn't just tell someone something I would usually, if it's a reference question, walk them through how to find that information themselves, teach them how to use the interfaces, like show them my thought process, like see where.

their thought process is so that they can do it without me, right? Like, that's how I was taught. Like, in my reference class in grad school, like, this is how you do the reference interview. This is what your role as a reference librarian is. At the University of Illinois, like, the grad assistants there, like, you, like, go through like a fucking, like, almost like a boot camp a week before, like, you even start library school if you were going to work at a reference desk there where you were just grilled on all of the different reference interview stuff and you practice and you practice and you

practice any practice. And it's like you never just answer someone's question, ever. It's always you walk them through how to do it and you ask all these, like, seriously, before I even was in my reference class, they were like, you are not allowed to sit at this reference desk if you don't know how to do this. And so it was just like fascinating to see reference library just answering trivia questions. So I just didn't know when that switch happened. And then one of the other articles that you had us read Justin, like talked about sort of like, Like, is this change good or not, right? Yeah.

Like, yeah. The other one I have a chance to go back over. So I most did the one about the movie. The modern corporate librarian would probably be like digital asset management. Yeah, it would be like Luis's job. Yeah. After computerization in the 90s, organizations generate so much information that they need someone to actually sort it.

So that's where DAM comes in and metadata. So it's not so much you need to build a reference library. You need to build a database of your own assets because you've got so much stuff. Yeah. Or it'd be like if it's as like a newsroom, it would be like all of the like research assistant interns. Yeah. I mean, those jobs all kind of went away from what I understand is that these jobs don't exist anymore in this movie. But they didn't go away till relatively recently.

Like I'd say last 20-ish years, 30 years. So it took a while. And I think mostly that was that changed wasn't really the end. internet was probably like changes in media landscape and the 90s. Like it was probably cable killed it. Really? I mean, because like news changed to opinion and talk radio kind of stuff. News that happened today.

Yeah. And also the proliferation of like local stuff that's all syndicated their main content. So yeah, I guess that's probably that would be the industry stuff. I don't know. I've always been interested in corporate librarianship. I was, I did want to. I think I did. apply for corporate librarianship job one time.

Oh, I was straight up, like, one of my mentors was like, get a cushy, you know, corporate librarian job with like Amazon or something and pay off your student loans in like two years. And I did not do that. I don't know how many people you even pay that good. You know, exaggerating hyperbole, but, you know, the whole, if I removed meta from my metadata title, I'd be making like a bazillion dollars, you know, when I had metadata in my time. I haven't seen that many corporate jobs, but I haven't really been looking either. I don't really see them.

I remember when like Netflix would post a like metadata job that everyone would like go ham about it. Or like I remember the person who taught the taxonomy or like the Thesaurus building class, the Theris Construction class at UI. The adjunct who did that was the taxonomist for Etsy. Yeah. No, there's definitely some people who's, I think there's like publisher jobs and stuff. that hire librarians. And there was that part-time gig that I applied for.

It was to do metadata for like OER or open publishing or something. It might have been for Thoth or something like that. Oh, I did have a note that her apartment's huge. Yeah. If it's supposed to be a New York City apartment. I mean, which I think it is, that great, like, phallic establishing shot at the beginning of the skyscraper they work in. Yeah, I don't think it was supposed to be Chicago or anything. Oh, you wanted to talk about librarians on Jeopardy.

Yeah. So what this was reminding me of the whole time was the whole like, because they're all the, the librarians in this, they're not really shown to be actually looking things up a lot of the time. They just know shit, right? They just know things at the top of their head. She has her little mine palace. And what queued me to write that in the notes of we, can we please talk about librarians on Jeopardy is one of the other librarians in it like, when Catherine Hepburn's character said that she has a bad memory, I wrote the exact quote down was, you chose to go into reference work with a bad memory, as in like the whole idea that people have, that librarians just know everything, right? Which we don't. But there's the whole, like,

I do know how many librarians I know who, like, have, like, I went to grad school with someone who got on Jeopardy. There was that one librarian recently who got on Jeopardy. Like, there's been like a couple librarians on Jeopardy, but there's this whole like, you know, people think librarians know everything. And I feel like a lot of required advocacy for what our roles are and what we do should be to dispel that actually to be like, no, it's not that I know everything. It's that I have the skills to find things and I can, I have the skills to teach you those skills on how to find

things, right? But then you still get the like a million librarians on Jeopardy thing where it's like, oh, that's the perfect person to be on Jeopardy, right? A librarian, because librarians know everything. It's like... Librarians as encyclopedia. A lot of us are just neurodivergent. A lot of us just really like trains, okay? Yeah, guys.

Have you thought of that? I watched a lot of trivia shows. Yeah, I was in Scholar Bowl in high school. The Scholastic Bowl, I was like the captain, we won a lot. Because I do know... Jay, are you a nerd? Yeah, I don't know. Like, that was just like how this movie...

was for trying librarians as the like. They didn't even need to look things up. They just knew it. Right? Because they had memorized it. They knew all this trivia. And the fact that, oh, my memory is bad. Oh, you went into reference work and you don't know everything and you're not on jeopardy.

What I really would have liked to see is not just that they like knew everything, but like that they knew who their users were. Yeah. We don't know any of these people asking questions. Well, at one point when like the machine is like trying to answer the question and is spitting out the like 80 stanza poem or whatever and she's like, well, that's not going to be the correct answer. Like it's going to give you a review for this movie instead of the actual answer that you're going for. Like instead of just being like, oh, well, I know where that answer is. I'm going to go find it immediately because I know exactly where it is or I already know it. Like be like, oh, well, that's, you know, Betty from blah, blah, blah.

And she's doing a segment on this. and that wouldn't have made any sense. So let's try over here or, you know, like more of a like, I would have much rather seen like them knowing the kinds of things that the people that they're helping are up to. They're really bad at the reference interview, actually. Yeah, yeah. And that's what gives them the advantage over the machine just spitting out facts is like they actually like have an actual human elements to it instead of just being like the

walking encyclopedia. And she's like, let's show them how humans do it, girls. And they just march off to like find the facts. And I'm like, they don't really show the human element. They really don't show the human element. They just pick up the phone and like, oh, question, I know the answer. Beep. And then that's like, they don't do the reference.

And like, that's probably part of the whole screwball comedy of it. Right. Yeah. Like, it's funny. It's funny. But like in terms of the poison one. Yeah. Where it's like someone calls that ask and they're like, yeah, there's these poisons that are

undetectable, but we are not allowed to say them on air. or something. That was like, that's cute. I don't know, like, librarians as like walking trivia, and they're also like gossipy. Like, it felt like very of that's, those are the same thing, right?

The gossip, the knowing everything. The astrology gets brought up a lot in this. I mean, it was hip at the time to do astrology stuff. Yeah, I think I covered all my major points about like AI and the scaremongering stuff, which is what I wanted to like,

clothes on. But yeah, the punch cards and like the merger of library and information science is already kind of happening before World War II. And like computer science as well. Yeah, it was, I mean, it took off into a different field. But before that, there was a lot of like taxonomy that was just like, we'll do taxonomy of everything. And a lot of that actually got destroyed during World War II and got set back and then computer science took off and caused a little split. But also it's a a lot of the computing in this movie couldn't actually do anything that they wanted it to do. So that's why computing and libraries took another couple decades to really take off. Because these computers are huge and slow.

Slow and coding information takes time. Yeah, it's the Bitcoin. You know, it's too slow to actually be usable for what it was initially meant to be used for. Yeah. Buying a pizza would take like two hours. That doesn't work, right? Yeah, unless you centralize. it. Yeah, which defeats the purpose of it.

Basically. Yeah. So it's similar, similar thing. Like, it's creating a solution to a problem that wasn't really there. And then it just creates more problems. Yeah. Yeah. There's a way to do automation. I think automation has its place in library sign, right? There's so much, you know, how much time is fucking wasted? It's like just keeping the OCLC, like, records in Koha up to date because that's not an automatic sync that happens. And our records are old and bad. And so they don't just like match when I batch upload them. And so I have to do a lot of manual matching.

Do you know much time that fucking takes me? And I normally make my student workers do it. But I don't have them in the summer. So then I have to do it. You know how it's time that fucking takes? It takes a long time. What if that were automated? That'd be great.

I would love that. Because then I could do more important things like writing documentation and making like instruction videos and, you know, doing my job. That would be good, you know, but no, that's not what gets automated, not without switching ILSs, you know? Yeah, I think the main possibility of like AI will be, it probably won't even be like chat GPT stuff. It'll be the underlying technology, like that builds.

I don't remember what they're called, but there's a word for like the nodes, the statistical nodes that take information and make it like, okay, these clumped together because like there's an 87% chance like this is the next word. And it creates like these maps, but they're called like mats, like M-A-T-E-S or something like that. Oh, okay. It's some kind of like linked data, but it's all automatically generated. So you just run it through a computer and it makes these. Like topic modeling?

I think it's like that, but it's got another term because someone was talking about. Oh, cool. That is really neat. They were feeding all the data of archive.org into one of these maps. And they were like, oh, yeah, we could just automate libraries, man. And everyone was like just dragged him because he was like 20 years old and an idiot. And he's like, okay, yeah, it would take a lot of time to put new information in there. But it's like, it's the same simple problem.

It's like, no, it's not. Because also it's who's going to encode the data? Like it can be done statistically, but it's like these PDFs aren't always readable or, you know, there's all kinds of problems if they're retracted, stuff like that. But yeah, he was explaining how the generation is actually done. He's like, yeah, that doesn't take any time at all. It's just computing power issues. But you probably will see this first in like legal applications where they'll just build citation trackers and that way corporate lawyers can have them. And your public defender won't have it so they can look up more precedent than your lawyer can.

And that's kind of like already how the tiered systems of like Lexus Nexus already work. Yeah. So that's where I imagine seeing like useful. But if you use Chad GPT, it would just like make up precedent because it hallucinates. Yeah, because it's just about prediction of like what fits the pattern and not actually what's factually correct. Yeah, it's trained to not cite its sources. And also a lot of data is proprietary. Which is bad.

Yeah. It means also that it's not going to be able to build like a legal database because that's all owned by LexisNexis and Westlaw. Yeah, fuck Alexis. Yeah. Listen to our episode on data cartels. Yep. All right. Arthur's take good night.

He looked at the computer. That means you said good night. Okay. Good night.