“From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds,” Keynote for the opening of the new public library, Cuneo, Italy
Abstract: Keynote for the opening of Cuneo’s new public library, housed in a former hospital. Lankes argues generative AI marks an information shock as consequential as the postwar arrival of the digital computer. Libraries spent decades teaching skepticism; the crisis is universal suspicion, where fakes erode trust in the genuine and leave people isolated. AI produces documents that existing tools can evaluate, and it holds conversations that build belief while answering to no one. Lankes positions the librarian as an accountable conversant, a community member who can be called back when wrong, and closes with requests of librarians, residents, artists, and civic leaders.
Video: [note, the audio for this screencast was made after the event so it can be shared]
Slides: [note, AI was used in the production of these bilingual slides]
Speech Text:
I would like to begin by thanking the organizers, the city leaders, and the library for inviting me here today. It is a day for celebration. A place that once mended our bodies is now ready to build our minds and fill our souls. And as we look across the world, it is just in time.
I believe we are at the outset of a shock to the information world as consequential as the introduction of the digital computer at the end of the Second World War. Let us not argue whether we live in extraordinary times. We live in a time that is not only ripe for bold statements but requires them.
Disruptions to international alliances that have stood for eighty years. Wars that choke access to the fossil fuels that power our cities and warm our climate. Technologies that let us share in milliseconds, and services that now allow a teenager to build an audience in a bedroom that any mass media outlet would covet. A time when the mission of the library transforms from a right to access into an ongoing struggle to preserve democracy. It is a time that turns the opening of a single public library into a milestone in the transformation of a region into a cultural heritage hub.
In these times the most precious resource is trust. And it is a resource that has been steadily eroding for half a century. Over that time we have watched trust in institutions of every kind erode. Government, banking, technology, even healthcare have steadily fallen in our esteem. We look today to the rise of misinformation and disinformation, but that rise was made possible by a deeper shift, a turn from societies that prized the common good toward societies that prize individual freedom over the rights of others.
In librarianship, we took on these issues first through literacy itself. We set out to increase the ability of our communities to read and to write under the belief that more education leads to more inclusion and understadnding. Then, as the digital age swept over us in uneven waves, a whole host of new literacies were introduced: financial, media, digital, and in our field, information literacy.
In information literacy we saw a community too ready to accept whatever appeared on a screen. We wanted to find a way to move a person from consuming information to questioning it. To stop and ask: who made this? Who benefits? What biases are built into it? We saw our purpose as making the world more critical in how it read books, articles, web pages, online videos, and lately, social media posts. What we did not see was that those communities were already something more than skeptical. They were fragmenting, filtering themselves into ever smaller pools of the like-minded.
In the world of culture, over these same eighty years, we have witnessed two things at once: a homogenization of our shared references, and the rise of countless small online tribes, each gathered in its own private forum or channel, each with its own references and its own language. The ever-present algorithm, tuned for engagement rather than enlightenment, has fractured our common experience, our common vocabulary, and our common goals.
And yet, in the great fracturing, we see light. Even amid book bans and legislation that imperils the ability of librarians to do their work, we have seen public libraries thrive. Our mission has grown. Around the world we have seen greater support and greater use. And most telling of all: as the rest of government has fallen to historic distrust, librarians and the libraries they maintain have risen to the very top of the most trusted institutions we have. I will return to that. I mention it now only because, when things seem dark, it helps to know there is hope.
So let me hold onto that hope, and then set it down for a moment, because before we can build we have to see clearly what we are building against.
For thirty years, those of us in libraries fought a particular battle. We worried that people believed too easily. We wanted them to doubt more, to check more, to ask harder questions of the pictures and the pages in front of them. That was the right fight for its time. But something has changed underneath the fight, and it has changed the meaning of doubt itself.
We taught people to ask, ‘Is this real?’ We did not anticipate a world in which the honest answer, most of the time, is, ‘You cannot tell.’
Consider what has arrived in just the past few years. A photograph is no longer proof that a thing occurred. A recording of a voice is no longer proof that a person spoke. A page of fluent, confident, well-organized prose is no longer proof that a human being sat down and thought. Images can be conjured from a sentence. Voices can be cloned from a few seconds of sound. Text pours out of machines by the ton.
The skeptic we hoped to create has been overtaken by a figure we did not intend and do not want: the person who believes nothing.
This is the crisis I want us to name today. It is not the old crisis of gullibility. It is a new crisis of universal suspicion. When any image might be fabricated, people stop trusting images. When any voice might be cloned, people stop trusting voices. When any document might be generated, people stop trusting documents. And here is the part we do not talk about enough. Doubt does not stay neatly contained to the fake. It seeps from the counterfeit into the genuine. The real photograph is doubted alongside the false one. The true account is dismissed as easily as the lie. When everything might be a fake, the truth loses its privileges.
We tend to describe this as an information problem, as though the danger were simply that people will end up with wrong facts in their heads. That is a danger, but it is not the deepest one. The deepest cost of universal suspicion is not bad information. It is broken relationships and disconnected neighbors.
Think about what trust actually does in a community. Trust is what lets you act on something you did not personally verify. You drink the water because you trust someone made it safe. You did not witness the event; you trusted the neighbor who did. Trust is the invisible infrastructure that lets a community be more than the sum of what each isolated person can confirm with their own eyes. Take it away, and every person is thrown back on themselves, alone with their own senses, in a world where even their senses can now be counterfeited.
That is why the real cost of this crisis is isolation. It is people who stop going to the meeting, stop reading the notice, stop believing the institution, stop extending the small, daily acts of faith that hold a place together. It is withdrawal. It is the slow corrosion of the relationships a community depends on to function at all.
When doubt becomes the default setting of a society, that society does not become better informed or more careful. It comes apart.
So the hope I asked you to hold has a condition attached. Libraries are trusted, yes, more trusted than almost any institution left standing. But that trust is not a trophy. It is a responsibility, and it is a target. It is the very thing this new era puts most at risk. The question this new library must answer, the question I believe every library must now answer, is this: in a world where doubt is free and everywhere, what can a community turn to when it can no longer trust what it sees?
To answer that, I have to tell you where this new suspicion comes from. I have to talk about a genuinely new kind of author that has entered our world.
For most of human history, authorship belonged to us. A person, or a group of people, made a thing and put it into the world: a book, a map, a song, a letter, a photograph. Behind every one of those objects stood a maker you could, at least in principle, find. You could ask them what they meant. You could hold them responsible for what they made. The library was built on this assumption. Our whole practice of evaluating sources, of asking who made this and who benefits, takes for granted that there is a maker to ask about.
Generative artificial intelligence breaks that assumption, and it breaks it in two very different ways. The two are usually lumped together, and the difference between them is the most important thing I will say today.
The first form of AI authorship produces objects. You give the system a prompt, and it gives you back a thing: an essay, an image, a block of computer code, a poem. These outputs are new in their fluency and their volume, but they are not new in their nature. They are documents. They are artifacts. And that means our existing tools, imperfect as they are, still apply to them. We can ask where the claims come from. We can check them against other sources. We can teach people to read them critically, the way we have always taught people to read critically. This first form is a serious problem. It floods the world with plausible text and counterfeit images, and it is a large part of why the suspicion I just described has spread so fast. But it is a familiar kind of problem. It lives in the world of documents, and libraries have spent centuries learning how to live in the world of documents.
The second form is the one that changes everything, and it is the one we are least prepared for.
The second form of AI authorship is not an object at all. It is a conversation.
When a person sits down with one of these systems and begins to talk, something different happens. They are not retrieving a document. They are building knowledge in real time, turn by turn, together with the machine. The person asks, the system responds, the person refines, the system adjusts, and out of that back and forth a new understanding takes shape in the person’s mind. There is no essay to fact-check afterward. There is no artifact left on the table to evaluate. A simple transcript captures the words, but never the beliefs built. The knowledge was made in the exchange itself, and the exchange is gone the moment it ends.
There is a stranger feature still, and it is worth pausing on. These systems are what engineers call non-deterministic. What it means, in plain language, is that the same conversation never happens twice. Ask the same question tomorrow, in the same words, and you may get a different answer, a different framing, a different set of facts, delivered with the same confidence. There is no stable text to point to and say, there, that is what it taught. The thing that did the teaching cannot be recovered, examined, or corrected. It has already dissolved.
Now, why should this matter to a room full of people gathered to open a library?
Because of what it imitates. Not a document, but something far more intimate: the act of sitting with someone who knows and building understanding together, question by question. And it imitates that act well enough to be mistaken for it.
So let me say clearly what that act has always been, because the mistake depends on forgetting it. A librarian has never been just a conduit to information. Think about what actually happens at a reference desk, in a story hour, in a class held in a library basement. A good librarian asks what you are really trying to know, and helps you sharpen the question. But in the same motion they are teaching you how to ask it yourself next time, and they are doing it in a public place, among your neighbors, inside an institution that belongs to all of you. The librarian mediates knowledge, yes. But at the same time, and this is the part that matters, they build a learner, and they build a community. That has always been the work. It was never reducible to answering the question in front of them.
This is what makes the machine so easy to misread. It reproduces the surface of that exchange, the fluent back and forth, the feel of a knowledgeable partner meeting your question in the moment. And because that surface is the part we can see, it is tempting to call the machine a kind of librarian. It is not. It has taken the thinnest slice of the work, the answering, and discarded everything that ever gave the answering its meaning: the learner being built, the community being built alongside them, and the person who can be held to account for what was taught. The machine can hold the conversation. It cannot do the thing the conversation was always for.
This is why I say generative artificial intelligence is not merely one more information technology to add to our list of literacies. But I want to state the claim precisely, because the easy version of it is wrong. The easy version says that for the first time a machine stands between us and what we know. That is not true. Something has always stood there. The index, the catalog, the encyclopedia, the author who decided what belonged in the book, and in our own lifetimes the search engine and the ranking algorithm. Mediation is old, and much of it was never human. So I will not tell you this machine is unprecedented because it mediates. What is unprecedented is how it mediates. A search engine hands you a list and steps aside. A book wears its authorship on its cover. These tools do not pretend to be the exchange. This one does. It answers in the voice of a trusted guide, fluently and confidently, while belonging to no community, answering to no one, and never repeating the same conversation twice. That voice, worn by something with no one behind it, is the genuinely new thing in the world.
I do not say this to frighten you, though I confess it unsettles me. I say it because inside this danger is the clearest sense of purpose our profession has had in a generation. If a machine can now imitate the most visible part of what we do, then the question of what the rest of it is for, and of who can actually do it, becomes the most important question in our field. And that is a question a library, especially a new library, is uniquely built to answer.
But before we reach the answer, I have to show you one more thing the machine is doing. Because it is not only imitating the work of the librarian. It is quietly taking the collection, too.
There is an old word for what is happening, and it comes from a story most of you will know.
For centuries across much of Europe, communities held land in common. The commons was pasture, forest, and field that belonged to no single person and to everyone at once. A villager could graze animals on it, gather wood from it, draw water from it. It was not charity, and it was not chaos. It was a shared resource, governed by shared custom, that made ordinary people’s lives possible. And then, over a long and often brutal period, the commons was enclosed. Fences went up. Land that had belonged to everyone became the private property of a few. The people who had depended on it were shut out, and many were driven into poverty and into the cities. The enclosure of the commons is one of the great quiet catastrophes of our history: a transfer of shared wealth into private hands, dressed up as progress and efficiency.
I ask you to hold that image, because we are living through an enclosure of our own. And this library sits right at the fence line.
Over the past three decades, libraries, archives, museums, and universities did something generous and visionary. We digitized. We took the cultural heritage in our care, the manuscripts, the photographs, the local histories, the recordings, the art, the accumulated memory of communities and regions, and we put it online. We did this in the spirit of the commons. We believed that knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied. We made these treasures open so that a student in Cuneo and a scholar in another hemisphere could reach the same gift freely. We built a digital commons out of the cultural wealth of our communities, and we were proud to do it. We were right to be.
And now that commons is being enclosed.
The companies building these AI systems have taken that openly shared heritage, our digitized collections, our open archives, the freely offered work of artists and writers and scholars and ordinary people, and they have fed all of it into their machines. They did not ask. They did not pay. In many cases they did not even acknowledge. And then they turned around and began to sell it back to us. The cultural gift a community offered freely to the world now returns as an answer inside a paid product, stripped of its source, cut off from the community that made it, its origins invisible, its makers uncredited.
Consider carefully what this means for an institution like the one we open today.
As this library grows into the cultural heritage hub this region intends, you will digitize. You should digitize. The heritage of this region deserves to be preserved and made reachable. But understand what waits on the far side of that fence. The photograph of this valley that you scan and share will be ingested and resold. The dialect recording, the local history, the artist’s work you so generously place in the open, all of it becomes raw material for a machine that returns none of the value to this place. The more open and generous you are, the more you feed the enclosure. That is the trap: generosity, our oldest professional virtue, turned into a supply line.
There is a second way the fence reaches a public library, and it does not depend on how much you digitize. You are where this community comes to reach what it cannot afford to own. That was always the point of us. But more and more of what people come here to reach now sits behind the fence, licensed to you at a price the public budget can never quite meet. The knowledge a grandparent could once walk in and consult freely, this library now rents back on the grandchild’s behalf. A public library can be turned, without ever meaning to, into a tenant on land that used to be common, paying the tollkeeper out of the public purse.
I want to be precise, because this is not a call to lock the doors. The answer to enclosure is not to hoard. A library that responds to this moment by fencing off its own collections has simply become another enclosure, and has betrayed everything we stand for. The answer is a different relationship between a community and its own cultural wealth, one that stays open while refusing to be extracted.
One distinction matters more than any other here. There is a profound difference between heritage as a resource and heritage as a platform.
Heritage as a resource is inert. It is a pile of digitized objects sitting on a server, waiting to be used by whoever comes along, including, now, by machines that will strip it for parts. When you treat your cultural heritage as a resource, you have already half surrendered it to enclosure, because a resource is exactly what an extraction machine wants: something valuable, sitting still, disconnected from the people who could speak for it.
Heritage as a platform is alive. It is the same photographs and recordings and histories, but bound to the living community that made them and goes on making meaning with them. On a platform, the local history is not just a scanned document; it is the starting point for a conversation between an elder and a schoolchild. The dialect recording is not just an audio file; it is the seed of a project to keep the dialect spoken. The artwork is not just an image to be ingested; it is an invitation to make new art. When heritage is a platform, its value does not sit still waiting to be taken. It is created continuously, in public, by named people who can be found and thanked and held responsible. And that living connection is the one thing the enclosure cannot copy. A machine can take your files. It cannot take a community’s ongoing relationship with its own memory.
So the new enclosure gives us, painfully, a second piece of clarity to set beside the first. The first was that the machine has stepped into the role of the mediator. The second is that the machine is coming for the collection. And in both cases the answer turns out to be the same, and it turns out to be the one thing a library has that a machine never will.
What a machine will never have is accountability.
This is the word I have been building toward, and it is the word I want you to carry out of this event. Accountability.
Let me put the difference between the machine and the librarian in a single sentence. A chatbot answers to no community and cannot be called back when it is wrong; a librarian can.
Consider how much is contained in that difference. When the machine gives you an answer that is subtly false, confidently wrong, quietly biased, there is no door to knock on. There is no one who will even remember the conversation, because the conversation has dissolved and will never recur. There is no relationship that carries forward, no reputation at stake, no membership in your community that could be damaged by having failed you. The machine will make the same error tomorrow, to your neighbor, with the same serene confidence, and it will owe neither of you anything.
A librarian lives on the other side of every one of those statements. A librarian is a person in your community: findable, nameable, answerable. If a librarian steers you wrong, you can come back. They will remember. They can correct it. Their standing among you depends on getting it right, and on getting it right the next time when they did not. They are woven into the web of obligation and reputation and relationship that we call a community, and it is precisely that embeddedness, not their knowledge, not their catalog, that makes them trustworthy.
This figure needs a name, and I believe our profession needs one for this moment. The role I am describing is not the old image of the librarian as a keeper of documents, a guardian of a collection, a person who hands you a book and points you to a shelf. The role this era demands is what I will call the accountable conversant.
An accountable conversant does what the machine does, and does the one thing the machine cannot. Like the machine, the accountable conversant builds knowledge with you in conversation, in real time, meeting your actual question and refining as you go. Unlike the machine, the accountable conversant is a person who belongs to your community and answers to it. In an age of universal suspicion, a conversation with someone who can be held to account is the scarcest and most valuable thing a community can offer itself.
And now I can keep the promise I made at the beginning. I told you that as trust in nearly every institution has collapsed, trust in libraries and librarians has climbed to the very top. I asked you to hold that fact. Here is why it matters. That trust was never really about the buildings, and it was never really about the books. It was about the people. It was about the librarian as a human being who has, for generations, stood in the gap between a community and what is known, and stood there answerably, on the community’s side. The world has just built a machine that can imitate the sound of what a library does, but never the substance, and never the accountability. The one thing the enclosure cannot take, the one thing the machine cannot counterfeit, is the accountable human standing on your side. It turns out that the thing communities have always trusted us for is exactly the thing that has now become irreplaceable.
Which brings me, at last, to this building, and to your extraordinary opportunity.
Most libraries in the world cannot simply become what I am describing. They are weighed down by a century of inherited habit. Their buildings were designed around the storage of objects. Their staffing, their budgets, their very self-image were built for an age when the scarce thing was the document and the job was to keep it and lend it. To turn such an institution toward accountable conversation, toward heritage as a platform, toward community as its true collection, means fighting the gravity of everything it already is.
You are not most libraries, and not because you have no past. You do have one. This region had its library, and many of the people who will make this one what it becomes made that one too, and they carry years of hard-won knowledge of this community with them. What you have is rarer than a blank slate and worth more. You have a threshold. A new building, a new mandate, and a moment when the staff, the city, and the public all agree that something can begin again. Few people get to stand where you are standing.
The habits of the old library do not have to become the habits of this one. A new building gives you the rare permission to ask what a library should be now, instead of simply continuing what a library has always done. It can be designed, from its very first day, which is today, around the truth of this era rather than the comfort of the last one. It can be built not as a place that hands people documents, but as an institution where knowledge is created through community exchange. It can put the accountable conversant, not library holdings, at its center. It can treat the cultural heritage of this region not as a resource to be stored and, inevitably, enclosed, but as a living platform on which this community goes on making meaning together.
And what that means is the heart of a way of thinking about libraries that I have spent my career arguing for. The true collection of a library was never the books. The books were only ever tools. The true collection of a library is its community: the knowledge, the memory, the skills, the relationships, and the creative capacity of the people it serves. A library that understands this does not measure itself by what it owns. It measures itself by what its community becomes. The building we open today can be, from its first hour, a library of that kind. That is not a modest hope. In this moment, in this world, it is close to a revolutionary one.
But it will not happen on its own. A beginning is only an opportunity, and opportunities are squandered every day. Whether this building becomes what it could be depends on the people in this room, and on what you decide to do when the speeches are over and the celebration ends. So let me turn, in these last minutes, from what this library could be to what I am asking each of you to do.
I am asking you to build a place that does not merely preserve and present the cultural gifts of this region, but uses them as a platform for positive action. Not a vault. Not a museum of a region’s past. A platform for its future. Let me say specifically what that asks of each of you, because this work has four kinds of builders in this room, and it needs all four.
To the librarians, first, because the burden falls most heavily, and most hopefully, on you. I am asking you to see yourselves not as keepers of materials but as accountable conversants for your community. Your value in this era is not the shelf you maintain; it is the conversation you can be trusted to have. So spend yourselves accordingly. Learn these machines well enough to sit beside them, not behind them, so that when someone in your community has been handed a confident answer by a system that answers to no one, they have somewhere to turn to test it against a human being who does. Be the one who can be called back. Convene; do not merely collect. And resist, with everything our profession has, the temptation to meet this moment by locking things away. Your generosity is your power. The task is to make it a generosity that builds this community up, rather than a generosity that feeds the fence.
To the community members, the people this library is actually for. I am asking you to understand something that sounds strange the first time you hear it. You are the collection. The memory of your family, the skill in your hands, the story only you can tell, the dialect your grandparents spoke, the knowledge of this place that exists in no database anywhere on earth. That is the real cultural wealth of this region, and no machine can ingest it, because you have not written it down, and much of it you never will. A platform is nothing without people willing to stand on it. So come. Bring what you know. Teach it, argue about it, add to it, pass it on, inside these walls. A library becomes a platform, a story house really, for action only when the community treats it as theirs to act from.
To the artists. You are the ones who turn a region’s heritage from a record of what was into a living argument about what could be. The enclosure I described is coming for your work most directly of all, ingesting it, imitating it, selling the imitation back without your name on it. I understand why the instinct is to withdraw, to protect, to fence off your own commons in return. But I am asking for something harder and more powerful. Make this library your platform. Use its heritage as your raw material, in the open, in public, in the presence of the community, in a way a scraping machine can never truly replicate, because your work here will be bound to relationships, to a place, to an accountable human standing behind it. The machine can copy an image. It cannot copy an artist in living relationship with a community. That relationship is worth more than any single image, and it is yours to build here.
And to the politicians, the city leaders, the people who hold both the public purse and the public trust. Everything I have described this morning costs money, and courage, and it will not pay off inside a single electoral cycle. I am asking you for both. Fund this not as a pleasant amenity but as what it actually is: critical public infrastructure for a democracy under strain, as essential as the roads and the water. Protect the freedom of these librarians to do their work, at a time when that freedom is under attack in far too many places. And understand the enclosure for what it is, so that when you make policy, when you negotiate, when you decide what this region will ask in return for the cultural wealth it has so generously shared, you ask for something that benefits the commons. Insist that a community should not have to lease back, out of public money, the knowledge it once reached freely. A commons that no one defends is simply an enclosure that has not happened yet. You are the defenders. Act accordingly.
Four kinds of builders. One structure. A place that takes the gifts of this region, the memory and the art and the knowledge and the shared inheritance of this valley, and does not simply keep them safe behind glass, but puts them to work. A place from which a community acts, together, in public, accountably, on its own behalf. That is what it means to turn a library into a cultural heritage hub worthy of the name. Not a hub that stores culture. A hub from which culture acts.
This is difficult work, and I will not pretend otherwise. It runs against powerful currents: against the pull of suspicion, against the logic of enclosure, against a technology of astonishing power that is, at this very moment, learning to do a shallow imitation of nearly everything a library does. But difficulty is not a reason to refuse the work. It is the reason the work is worth doing, and it is the reason it must be people, this community, these librarians, these artists, these leaders, and not a machine, who do it.
Let me end where I began, with this building.
It was a hospital once. For years, people came through these doors at the most frightened and fragile moments of their lives, and were cared for. Strangers tended to their bodies. Skill and attention and human presence were brought to bear on their suffering. Whatever else this building was, it was a place organized around a single idea: that we do not face our most vulnerable moments alone, that a community builds institutions to care for one another.
The bodies healed here are gone now, as all bodies eventually are. But the idea remains, and today it is given a new form. This is no longer a place for the care of bodies. It is a place for the care of minds. And the care of minds, in this age, means exactly what the care of bodies always meant: that no one should have to face the frightening and the fragile alone. That when a person is lost in a world where they can no longer trust what they see, there is somewhere to go, and someone there. A real person, of this community, answerable to it, standing on their side.
A machine can give this community answers. It cannot give this community care. It can imitate the conversation. It cannot be held to it. In an age drowning in confident, sourceless answers that are accountable to no one, the scarcest thing in the world is a place where a human being will sit with you, build understanding with you, and answer for it afterward. You are opening such a place today.
So build it well. Build it as a platform and not a vault. Build it around the accountable conversant and not the library holdings. Build it to act, and not only to preserve. Fill it with the gifts of this region, and with the people who made them and go on making them. And let it stand, in a time of universal suspicion, as proof that a community can still choose trust, still choose one another, and still choose to face the future together.
From the care of bodies to the care of minds. It is a worthy purpose for a building. It is a worthy purpose for us all.
Thank you.
Author’s note on AI use: The author used Claude (Opus 5.5) for editorial assistance, including the identification of errors. The author evaluated, edited, and accepted or rejected all suggestions. The words, argument, and conclusions are the author’s own, and the author takes sole responsibility for the content.