There you have it! Librarians in Bangor, Maine and South Philadelphia are now running workshops t…
July 26, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
Workforce
There you have it! Librarians in Bangor, Maine and South Philadelphia are now running workshops to teach people how to turn AI OFF.
Hannah Cyrus built a class called "Avoiding AI" after patrons kept asking her the same question at the reference desk: "How do I turn this AI stuff off?" She had to cap registration at 30 and add a waitlist. Two sessions pulled 70 people each. Librarians from around the world started emailing her for the slides.
Charlie Bailey ran the same workshop in Philadelphia. 20 adults showed up in a room normally set up for kids' story time, phones out, following his step-by-step instructions to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Let's be fair to the librarians first. Their complaint is real. Apple and Google shipped these features default-on, buried the toggle three menus deep, and never asked permission. That's not paranoia. That's a product decision made to juice usage numbers for investors. Turning off a specific feature that's badly built, invasive, or just useless for you is a completely legitimate consumer choice. Hate Copilot rewriting your emails? Kill it. That's not the problem.
The problem is teaching this as a philosophy: opt out of AI, reclaim your autonomy, move on with your life.
I wrote an entire book about what happens to people who take that position. It's called REPLACEMENT, and the thesis is simple: the people who bury their heads in the sand on AI aren't protecting themselves. They're the first ones who get replaced.
There's a real difference between "I evaluated this feature and it's garbage, so I turned it off" and "I don't want to deal with AI at all, so I'm opting out of learning it." The first is a smart consumer. The second is someone who will be blindsided in eighteen months when the coworker who spent that time mastering these tools does their job faster, cheaper, and better.
You don't have to like every AI feature Big Tech force-feeds you. You do have to understand the technology well enough to make that call on purpose, instead of just closing your eyes.
Learn what the toggle does before you flip it.
Source: https://lnkd.in/e2DW2uhJ
Thoughts?
Hannah Cyrus built a class called "Avoiding AI" after patrons kept asking her the same question at the reference desk: "How do I turn this AI stuff off?" She had to cap registration at 30 and add a waitlist. Two sessions pulled 70 people each. Librarians from around the world started emailing her for the slides.
Charlie Bailey ran the same workshop in Philadelphia. 20 adults showed up in a room normally set up for kids' story time, phones out, following his step-by-step instructions to disable Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Let's be fair to the librarians first. Their complaint is real. Apple and Google shipped these features default-on, buried the toggle three menus deep, and never asked permission. That's not paranoia. That's a product decision made to juice usage numbers for investors. Turning off a specific feature that's badly built, invasive, or just useless for you is a completely legitimate consumer choice. Hate Copilot rewriting your emails? Kill it. That's not the problem.
The problem is teaching this as a philosophy: opt out of AI, reclaim your autonomy, move on with your life.
I wrote an entire book about what happens to people who take that position. It's called REPLACEMENT, and the thesis is simple: the people who bury their heads in the sand on AI aren't protecting themselves. They're the first ones who get replaced.
There's a real difference between "I evaluated this feature and it's garbage, so I turned it off" and "I don't want to deal with AI at all, so I'm opting out of learning it." The first is a smart consumer. The second is someone who will be blindsided in eighteen months when the coworker who spent that time mastering these tools does their job faster, cheaper, and better.
You don't have to like every AI feature Big Tech force-feeds you. You do have to understand the technology well enough to make that call on purpose, instead of just closing your eyes.
Learn what the toggle does before you flip it.
Source: https://lnkd.in/e2DW2uhJ
Thoughts?