Andrew Carnegie funded 1,689 libraries

Andrew Carnegie funded 1,689 public libraries between 1883 and 1929.

He refused to fund a single one if the town wouldn't sign a public commitment to run it. Forever. Staff, heat, new books, ten percent of the building cost every year, in writing.

A lot of the towns actually pushed back. They wanted the gift without the obligation and my guy Carnegie said no.

He understood something that is more relevant than ever today...

A check buys a building. People decide whether it becomes a library.

​This week Google did the largest distribution of AI agents in history. At I/O they announced Gemini Spark (autonomous agents that run in the background even when your laptop is closed), agents inside Search, and a flood of agentic features reaching the 900 million people who open the Gemini app daily.

Every person on the planet just got a building (the agent, the keys, full access).

Nobody got a librarian (someone or something that knows how to actually run it for you).

The agent shows up friendly. It greets you by name. It runs Google's example prompts impressively on the first try. It does anyone's work "brilliantly".

BUT, it cannot do YOUR work. At least not out of the box.

• It needs your specific patterns
• It needs your specific clients loaded in
• It needs the judgment you've built over years to live somewhere it can read

The capability is real. But the brains are missing.

Here's a test you can run right now. It takes about a minute.

Ask yourself: what did AI do for me this week that it couldn't have done for a stranger with the same subscription?

Sit with the answer.

If it's "a faster email" or "a cleaner summary" or "a decent first draft," your agent did exactly what it did for 900 million strangers.

If the answer is specific (a flag it caught because it knew your client, a risk it surfaced because it had learned your blind spots, a draft only your agent could write because the context was yours), you have moved up a level the majority of folks will miss.

Ask the question Friday. Ask it next Friday. Ask it the Friday after that. The weeks the answer comes back thin will teach you more than the weeks it's good.

I wrote the full piece on my Substack. It expands the Carnegie story, walks through what happened with a financial advisor named Glenn (twenty years of judgment compressed into a single transcript review), and explains why most company-wide AI rollouts right now are building libraries with no librarians.

​Read The Library With No Librarian →​

Stay Curious,
Max

P.S. Google's announcement was last Wednesday. The agents are already deploying. I built a recap of everything they shipped so I'd have it in one place (yours here). The smallest possible install on this week's news. The Friday question scales that habit, every week.