What happens to libraries and librarians when machines can read all the books? | Feral Librarian

"My thinking about AI, machine learning, & libraries, is guided by 3 kinds of questions:

1. What role can libraries play in making sure we don’t summon the demon; or at least that we have the tools to control or tame the demon?

1. How might we leverage AI in support of our missions? How might AI help us do some of our work better?
2. How might we support AI and machine learning in ways that are consistent with and natural evolutions of the long-standing missions and functions of libraries as sources of information and the tools, resources, expertise to use that information?

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Trying to understand a little bit about AI and machine learning has taken me way outside my cognitive comfort zone, but I think it is the kind of thinking we need to do to be effective library leaders and to be effective stewards of the future of libraries, librarianship, and for those of us in research libraries, for the future of scholarship.

I think it will be crucial that we avoid the temptation to continue to serve primarily individual human readers and let the computer scientists worry about how to apply machine learning and AI to vast libraries of resources.

I think we would be wise to start thinking now about machines and algorithms as a new kind of patron  — a patron that doesn’t replace human patrons, but has some different needs and might require a different set of skills and a different way of thinking about how our resources could be used."