“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (Chiseled on stone at Farley Post Office in NYC). Information delivery is important and has been essential to humans for thousands of years.

My father was a mailman, and he estimated that he walked around the world twice over the many years of carrying his mailbag.  My career as a librarian spanned 30 years and I came to realize we were both in the information delivery service!

Information delivery requires discerning priorities.  All data is not equal, and we are now drowning in it!  AI is rapidly becoming our number one information delivery service provider, which raises the question about how human beings prioritize the value of information and the evolving process of information seeking behavior.

Humans should be able to discern and prioritize information from accurate sources and experts.  Humans should not be robbed of the quest for knowledge and the journey through the “snow, rain, hear or gloom of night” to bring it forth!

Just think, for years it has been a federal crime to open mail that is not addressed to you!  Yet privacy is now on shaky ground. 

While we waited for days for news to arrive in the mail, we now expect answers to come to us instantly and rarely care where those answers came from nor the long history of humans working hard who created those answers. While a letter from one we love touched us deeply in the past, we now simply scroll and delete messages too quickly to bother with any reflection or savoring of the tactility.  

I often think of my father’s wisdom even though he is now gone.  I’ve never known anyone wiser, yet I had to watch his brain fail the last decade of his life with dementia.  The human brain is the most incredible and mysterious thing on our planet.  AI can never replicate it.

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