{"id":104,"date":"2026-07-21T17:28:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/?p=104"},"modified":"2026-07-21T17:28:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:28:20","slug":"summer-reading-and-what-we-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/2026\/07\/21\/summer-reading-and-what-we-make\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Reading and What We Make"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With August just around the corner, it feels like summer is already wrapping up and the excitement of a new academic year is just ahead. I’m entering my second year at Wake, with a newly named president<\/a>, and I’m already thinking about what the year will bring. My summer reading, as always, was a wide mix. I always have a bunch of books going at the same time, and this summer included old favorites, newer-to-me beach reads, and many connected to AI and this moment we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been chipping away at God, Human, Animal, Machine<\/a><\/em>, The AI Con<\/a><\/em>, Empire of AI<\/a><\/em>, and 50 AI Ideas You Really Need to Know<\/a><\/em>. On the classics side, I decided it was time to revisit stories of technology and humanity with The Time Machine<\/a><\/em>, The Island of Doctor Moreau<\/a><\/em>, and Frankenstein<\/a><\/em>. These texts all have a technologist at the center who doesn’t take responsibility for their impact on their creations or civilizations. Victor Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau create creatures without care for the creature or the impact of the creature on the world. And the Time Traveller arrives in a future he doesn’t understand, causes harm through carelessness and false confidence, and leaves. All three of these books feature different ways of refusing to stay in the room with the consequences of their invention. In many ways, that made them perfect reading alongside the AI titles. In the end, much of my summer reading was the Frankensteinian anxiety applied to the scientific frontiers of today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again and again, across all the titles, but especially Frankenstein<\/em> and Moreau<\/em>, the question is partly whether the creation will harm us<\/em>, but even more so, will we stay in the room with what we have made, or will we flee and call the consequences the creature’s fault?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I often find myself coming back to circles of concern, influence, and control<\/a>. The anticipatory dread of AI literature focuses on questions of what the technology will do to us, or p(doom)<\/a>. These are real concerns, but are also generally outside an individual’s control. The questions that feel more critical to me are about what I can influence, even if just on a local scale: what are we building into our tools, who is accountable when a system produces an outcome no one can trace, how do people learn to use (and when to not use) this technology. These are also questions that sit squarely in the domain of librarianship. Borrowing from the Frankenstein frame, these questions are less warnings about machines and more warnings about us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another theme of this summer’s reading has been creators and their inventions: specifically, lone-makers and the changes they unleash on the world. Victor works in secret. Moreau exiles himself to an island. Sam Altman is the OpenAI brand; Dario Amodei is the face of Anthropic. But contrary to these stories, I don’t actually know of that many things that are the result of a heroic lone-maker. I have only ever witnessed greatness as the result of a system: of teams, of scholarship built on prior scholarship, of groups working together in networks. And I think about what it looks like to work with AI to get to an answer: an individual asking their AI for input based on their own history, versus a team working together to build something meaningful. In my experience, the collaborative version tends to be the more creative one (though that intuition turns out to be more contested than I expected, which is a post for another day1<\/a><\/sup>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to reading, my family and I took a few trips. We went back to Seattle, a place that shaped me and that I contributed back to for nearly a quarter of my life. We revisited favorite places, ate great (and familiar) food, and connected with as many people as we could in a short visit. It was a gift to stand at a little distance and simply enjoy the place. We also took a trip to Boston, now that we live much closer and can easily get to my favorite East Coast city. We visited museums, shopped at terrific bookstores, and went on college tours. And across both trips we saw places and experiences created by many people over long periods of time, resulting in bespoke and differentiated institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I begin my second year back at Wake, I am thinking about what is to come. The strategic foundation my colleagues and I laid in year one is now passing into a shared future with new colleagues across the organization. I’m getting ready for the library’s leadership retreat tomorrow, where that phrase, my colleagues and I<\/em>, is again the central planning tenet. We have laid this foundation and are building on it together. The fantasy that a dean single-handedly authors an institution’s direction is the lone-maker myth in a different setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreau and Frankenstein stay in my mind as cautionary figures, and the caution is don’t build alone, stay in the room, take responsibility, and then be willing to let it go into the world without you.<\/em> That turns out to be the same lesson whether the thing that has been made is a new technology, a scholarly practice, or a strategic plan. <\/p>\n\n\n

  1. More to come on this… I have several articles I’m reading through about originality, text, and AI, and want to write something up on that after I finish reading them. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n
    \n\n\n\n

    This is a post in an ongoing project exploring libraries, knowledge, and the epistemic stakes of artificial intelligence. I\u2019m drawing on social epistemology, feminist theory, and two decades of practice in academic libraries.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With August just around the corner, it feels like summer is already wrapping up and the excitement of a new academic year is just ahead. I’m entering my second year at Wake, with a newly named president, and I’m already thinking about what the year will bring. My summer reading, as always, was a wide […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"More to come on this... I have several articles I'm reading through about originality, text, and AI, and want to write something up on that after I finish reading them.\",\"id\":\"1dbb0a8c-dd0b-4433-b62e-ca0db99b372c\"}]"},"categories":[5],"tags":[6,61,62,60],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-libraries-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-frankenstein","tag-leadership","tag-the-island-of-doctor-moreau","h-entry","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenpressley.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}