Sometimes I see a thing which hits me in a very specific way but it’s not a way that makes sense in a tiny social media post, depending how much you know about me. This image is one of those things.

This is a screenshot from the web page of a robotics company which has created a standalone tool called Jan that enables you to run a large language model (LLM) on your personal computer. This allows you to mess around with chatbot-type stuff without your interactions with it becoming part of the “training” for those things. I don’t want to be training an AI. I don’t have much use for chatbot/AI-type stuff in my life and work currently, but I feel it’s important to know a bit more about it than I do. So I downloaded and installed this thing and have been messing around with it. As I was reading its (scant) documentation, I scrolled down on the company’s home page and saw that their newsletter is called The Soul of a New Machine. This is funny.

It’s funny because The Soul of a New Machine is also the name of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book published over forty years ago about a computer project my dad led, back in the mainframe days. It was a big deal at the time. It was a big deal in my family and my dad got well-known for it for a while. A lot of people I know who are about my age considered it formative. Tracy Kidder went on to write a bunch of other terrific books. After growing up in a household where computers were considered “normal” even back in the 1980s, I’ve brought that information forward with me to my library, technology, and community work and I think it’s helped me to be better at what I do.

I’m now what folks might consider later-career. I’m faffing about with this newfangled technological stuff knowing both that it’s a big deal and also that I only sort of care about it (at my peril? perhaps.) and to come across this blast from the past in an “everything old is new again, huh?” way made me laugh.