They helped me realize that what I value about going to a good independent bookstore is curation. Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't g

They helped me realize that what I value about going to a good independent bookstore is curation. Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't get otherwise exposed to that an employee has selected to carry, and display. This is something I am bothered by: if top ten lists are based on what people buy, and what people buy is based on top ten lists, where does humanity enter into the picture? In the future we will have advanced AI like GPT-3 trained on the internet, generating content for the internet at far larger scales than humans, with that content being consumed to train the next generation of AI, like a snake eating its own tail and pushing human content into irrelevance. I feel like there’s the potential here for a dystopian novel where future humans are desperately trying to connect with another human in a giant maze of algorithmically generated conversations served up by AI bots through the metaverse.