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THE SAME CRITICAL LENS OF INFORMATION LITERACY THAT WE APPLY TO BOOKS AND ARTICLES MUST BE APPLIED TO AI; TO DO SO, WE WILL NEED A MUCH MORE POWERFUL LENS.
You can ask Google, Alexa, Cortana, Watson, or Siri-but will you be able to ask your local library? A century or so ago, electricity was a new, quasimagical thing-a novelty with few applications. Back then, nobody could have predicted that it would give rise to telephones, production lines, and microchips. And yet, electricity transformed every industry, including agriculture, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. As a foundational springboard for so many new innovations, that novelty was the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century.
Now, in the 21st century, a new quasi-magical thing has come into our lives: artificial intelligence (AI). And just as it was in the early days of the electronic revolution, we are only beginning to grasp how completely this new technology will transform our daily lives. Nearly all of today's emerging technologies are built on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated machine learning. Every major technology company is betting on machine learning, hoping to be a player in the coming revolution by developing proprietary machine intelligences to perform tasks that used to require human intelligence. Today, our interactions with AI are mostly novel ("Siri, why did the chicken cross the road?")-and the results crude-but so were the first lightbulbs and photographs.
The modern public library arose alongside the late 19thcentury/early 20th-century electrical revolution and has steadily adapted systems and services to new technologies ever since. However, AI will test the institution of librarianship as no technology has before. We value libraries because they keep us informed and connected; we read to enrich our lives and inform our decisions. But what happens when that decision-making process is fundamentally changed?
Machines are becoming skilled at learning, speaking, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. As a result, asking a machine for answers is quickly becoming a normal, everyday activity. As AI becomes better and better at understanding our information needs and delivering relevant answers, it seems likely we will come to rely on it more. Over time, these interactions will be less novel and more essential.
After the AI revolution, we will not read a library...