There is no AI worth it: a task that requires patience and a sense of humor
Last Sunday at dawn, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.7, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency, affected the city of Toyota. There were no deaths, but there were 22 injured, mostly due to contusions. Among the main material consequences, broken glass, disruptions in rail transport, and fallen objects are reported, such as the books in this establishment in Aichi prefecture. It is one of the branches of the Seibunkan Shoten chain: two floors, one thousand eight hundred square meters of sales area, and several hundred meters of bookshelves. There is no data on the total stock available, but the website describes it as one of the largest bookstores in the Nishi-Mikawa area. It is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. From eleven at night, it operates with a self-service system.
The photograph is overwhelming. The quantity of books scattered on the floor, without even space to put one's feet, makes it seem like an unattainable task. It provokes the anxiety of not knowing where to even begin. In the background of the image, a boy, all alone and crouched in the middle of the aisle, makes the mission of organizing them an even more disproportionate odyssey. The books are in perfect condition. They can be rearranged according to the subjects and categories that the bookstore has established. The luck is that each copy must not be very far from the place where it belongs.
In this task, there is no artificial intelligence that works. It is an exclusively human job that demands patience and, if possible, a sense of humor. It is better if they are a team, because this man alone in the middle of the sea of books reminds us of the myth of Sisyphus, punished by the gods with a repetitive and eternal task.
If rearranging the home library already seems like an epic task and, from time to time, when we cannot find the book we are looking for, the dream of organizing it better is reborn, this photograph discourages us from trying. Georges Perec, in his Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Sorting Out Books, already took the delirium of classifying books with humor. He warned that no criterion is ever completely satisfactory. In reality, we always end up trusting our internal order. The classification is not perfect and we are fully aware of the organizational chaos, but when it comes to locating a specific copy, there is always that intuitive, somewhat erratic path. It is like an impulse that leads us, as if the book were a magnet. We move as if we were guided by the effect of telepathy, we approach the goal clumsily and with a certain amount of suffering until the happiness of the discovery occurs.
On Tuesday, the Seibunkan Shoten website reported that the branch's doors were already open again since nine in the morning. It was only closed for two days and there is no record of the people who worked there or the system for reshelving the books. Nor do they indicate whether they added any special retention system in case of earthquake aftershocks, which the employees might appreciate.
