We
hear the terms “crowdfunding” and “crowdsourcing” and find the Kickstarter and
Wikipedia world to be fascinating. We’ve
come to a time where people can work together and contribute to the greater
good. But shouldn’t we see books as the
original crowdsource force for bringing ideas together for the collective, by
the collective?
We
may see books as individual units, each one an expression of ideas, research,
experiences, and views from single authors.
But when you look at all books and see we now have millions of people
who have crowdsourced history, fantasy, and everything in between, you realize
that all books are pieces to a bigger puzzle.
However,
books can’t tell us what is not known, and they can’t even speculate or raise
questions unless they have the capacity and vision to even ask such
things. Books are limited by the world’s
reality and history, by space travel and time, and by the physical limitations
of our brains. But what if books become
something other than written by humans?
If computers and robots get involved, could books look a lot
different? Would a book eventually
become unreadable – not because a computer may spew gibberish – but because
artificial intelligence will far exceed our capacity to comprehend information
and ideas presented to us?
Maybe
all of this pondering is meaningless.
It’s a certainty that computers will increasingly play a role in what
gets published. Computers already help
with research, editing, and generating word selection. Computers can analyze data and find patterns
that humans don’t detect easily.
Computers make us think differently about the world and tap into an
awareness that the world’s growth will depend on them.
It’s
hard to imagine that a creative form, such as writing, would be left to non-humans,
but in the future I have no doubt that robots will be our authors. It will
change the role of humans. Humans will
be editors and help determine if a robot’s book makes sense and is consumable by
its readers. The creative force will no
longer lie in being a writer but in penning code to ensure that robots produce
nothing less than Shakespearian quality.
We
may think of robots as being task-oriented machines. Lift this, crush that, measure this, move
that. But they are able to do so much
more and once they take words and turn them into bits of data and start to
process the billions and billions and billions of combinations and sequences of
words, they will produce a book that could win a Pulitzer or a Nobel
Prize. For all we know, it’s happened
already. Perhaps the owner of such an
invention or software prefers to remain anonymous and to keep this a secret.
Reading
a book, for the near future, however, seems like it won’t change. We’ll still read a book and choose to retain
what feels useful or interesting. But
maybe one day we’ll download books to a chip in our brains and the experience
will change dramatically.
It
all seems like a science fiction story you’d find in a book, but we look to be
moving in the direction of embracing technology and letting it take over every
aspect of our lives. Technology is invasive and touches everything that we do –
from work to play, from office to home to wherever we are. It went from being a novelty and an option to
a requirement. This is progress, on one
level, and something dehumanizing on another.
Whomever
or whatever writes books – and however humans consume these books – we know one
thing: there still remains a need for new stories, better stories, interesting
ideas, and the shared discovery of new information. Books crowdsource humanity’s needs to learn
and grow and that will never change.
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in
this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on
Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels
more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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