Farewell My Robot Librarian

I need to let my mind stray for a minute, so I want to write about a thought I had.

The most boring job I ever had was working as a volunteer in a local library more than a decade ago. My job was simply to look through every book shelf and make sure the books were in order per the Dewey decimal system. I’m not sure how I survived that. At least with watching paint dry, your mind can wander. If your mind wanders while putting books in numerical order, you’re a part of the problem and not the solution.

I realized today that I wouldn’t want anyone else to suffer through that, so I pondered how I would theoretically construct a “sorting” robot that would utilize OCR, a mechanical arm/claw, a rotor system, and treads. 

Then I realized that by the time that thing is ready, will libraries even still be libraries? Or will they just be a set of kiosks and e-readers in an open space. It’s easy to find a book when you can just search for them by typing in a keyword, or by saying the name of the book outloud. No need for Dewey at that point. The books would go straight to your device.

Oh well. Farewell library book sorting automaton. Born 8/22/2010. Died 8/22/2010.

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