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Tail Lights: Garbage In, Garbage Out Publisher: The Crittenden Automotive Library Byline: Bill Crittenden Date: 1 June 2023 |
 A completely made-up car by DeepAI. Is that...a pull-tab to open the rear window? |
2023 is a breakthrough year for AI.
I'm not worried about artificial intelligence replacing my work in building The Crittenden Automotive Library. Heck, it'd be nice to have a machine do the digital work for me so I can focus on book sales & scanning. But it is not that time yet.
There are programs that can make music, visual art, and videos, but the AI program making the most news in 2023 is ChatGPT. At its core it is a “chat bot,” a text-based system meant to take in mountains of previously written books & anrticles and generate human-like responses to all kinds of questions. It's great at that, it even figured out how to make shit up to sound smarter.
Even if that could be programmed out of it, it's supposed to sound human. It can generate fiction and poetry. It can probably help scientists organize thoughts into a coherent narrative for research papers.
It's not meant to be an all-knowing machine able to calculate objective truths. It will cite what it's been fed, including quoting opinion pieces as fact. It doesn't look like it can tell the difference between well researched papers and junk science yet.
Computer science has the concept of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. If you feed a computer bad data, you'll get poor results. If we want more truthful results, we have to be careful what we feed an AI program.
One day the auto industry might see AI generated body designs make it into production, or fully AI generated shop manuals indistinguishable from those authored & edited by humans. Or a system that can search and sort billions of photographs to find you exactly what you need despite SEO's best efforts to muck up search results with ad content. And, of course, perfecting autonomous driving.
But we're not there yet. The tools are simple, meant to aid human work, and humans are going to still be needed to feed good data in, weed out the junk & advertisements, and figure out what's real and what's fake, to create more useful AI tools.
For now.
629.2
The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.
I've spent a lot of my June work time organizing and inventorying a lot of printed material. We're up to 1100 books, over 1800 periodical issues, and 848 catalogs. Still haven't really even started the brochures, there's four drawers of them here, an unknown number to be blended in from John's collection, and just 26 listed so far.
The main point of an inventory, besides preventing unneccesary duplicate purchases (unless they're really cheap), is figuring out which ones can go on the scanner and which ones have to be stored away for future years.
Inventorying & organizing the books & magazines is still going to take a bit more of the summer, and if it drags far enough into fall I may get a professional bookedge scanner before actually getting anything online. But it'll be worth the wait.
History Beyond the Bumpers
The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.
I haven't seen Fast X. The podcast God Awful Movies did a review of it, and that's enough for me to stay up-to-date in the series. I lost interest when it changed from movies about street racers and crime to super spies saving the world. When the submarine broke through the ice in the last one I remember seeing, I leaned over to my wife and said, “remember when these movies used to be about street racing?”
While there are plenty of automotive podcasts, some of my favorite episodes are one-offs that fit into the scope of The Crittenden Automotive Library from podcasts that don't normally cover automobiles on a regular basis.
Citation Needed is a fun comedy podcast where one of the hosts takes a topic, usually from Wikipedia, and tells a story. Or, as they put it, “one of us reads an article from Wikipedia and pretends to be an expert, because this is the internet and that's how it works now.”
They've done episodes on Fordlandia, the death of Princess Diana, and Weird Cars. Also of note is the second half of the episode on The Trolley Problem when they apply it to autonomous vehicle ethics. But my favorite, by far, is The First Drive Across America. Whether or not you've heard the story of Horatio Nelson Jackson, this will make 35 minutes of any long drive pass like it was nothing.
Just remember that if a host on any non-automotive podcast gets a minor technical detail wrong, it can be a learning moment as we step outside of the traditional “automotive media” and see how casual commuters see their automobiles.
Mile Markers
Online Collection: Another quiet month for new site content, just 0.13% increase for the articles was all that made it online this month. Still an improvement over April, though!
Offline Digital Collection: A slight 3.57% increase in offline images is the result of saving pictures & graphics along with their corresponding PRWeb press releases.
The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: Programs has been renamed to Events as not everything in this category is the kind of thick, heavy paper event program you'd buy at the race track. Some are multi-page auction previews mailed out in advance, and I finally figured out a place to put racing press kits. It's still seeing the biggest percentage increase, up 41.41% to 140 total, and the earliest program dates back to 1977. Books had a 3.48% increase to 1100 total, with 993 different volumes. Periodicals were up by 417 issues, a 28.37% gain.
About The Crittenden Automotive Library
The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is an online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.
The Library currently consists of over 868,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 54,900 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.
About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection
The combined personal collections of John Walczak and Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 993 different book volumes, more than 1,690 unqiue periodical issues and over 730 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 229 hours of video.