This video raises many intriguing - and possibly unanswerable - questions. For those of us working in the library space some of those questions might include
- How will robotization and digital intelligences affect the way library services are provided?
- Where will the librarian fit in with all of this?
- How will those people whose jobs have been phased out utilize a library?
As CGP Grey’s video posits, digital entities capable of learning, interacting, and producing creative output can accomplish quite a lot. It’s conceivable that even this blog post could someday be written by a well-educated computer intelligence rather than the intern with a penchant for procrastination. That said, it’s entirely possible these advances could see the creation of more effective libraries, more effective librarians and all around more effective learning experiences.
The path to creating smarter, stronger and more capable machines lies in replicating our own psychological learning needs. The conundrum this presents is that the human learning process is an innumerable sum of different ethereal mental mechanisms.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes a bulk of these processes as "unsupervised learning." Zuckerberg has invested a great deal of time and capital into the development of artificial intelligence, making it one of Facebook, Inc.'s largest development projects.
In a recent Facebook status update about his aspirations for artificial intelligence development, Zuckerberg said, “Unsupervised learning is learning how the world works by observing and trying things out rather than being told what to do... It's key to building systems with human-like common sense because it doesn't require a person to teach it everything they know. It gives the machine the ability to anticipate what may happen in the future and predict the effect of an action. It could help us build machines that can hold conversations or plan complex sequences of actions... We fundamentally do not understand how general learning works... Until we solve this problem, throwing all the machine power in the world at it cannot create an AI that can do everything a person can.”
This is to say that the human mind is a vast, complex and unique thinking machine that cannot be defined by sheer horsepower. Understanding all of the mechanisms in which it learns is the key to not only the creation of artificial intelligence, but also more effective learning and teaching practices. A thinking machine can not only learn from human teachers, but also teach human learners.
Imagine the impact such an entity could have on a library. Makerspaces, writing labs, research, database optimization, all manner of workshops, all could see a dramatic overhaul of how they're performed, delivered and absorbed by they're audience.
As for the librarians, certain functions librarians perform such as the analyzing, management and acquisition of materials or information and data processing could foreseeably be delegated to thinking computers in the future, but the more human functions of librarians - those directly involved with enlightening and educating the users of the library - need not be replaced because such functions are best fostered by human relationships.
For example, people like to use Siri, but no one really respects Siri as a person. "She" is not a mentor, or a teacher, or a researcher or a friend. "She" doesn’t recognize her user’s learning process or where it might be stumbling, and can only provide feedback in the form of suggestions of what "she" believes they might have meant based on her programming. Digital intelligence may be able to replicate operational functions, but the human capacity for learning requires a set of intangible qualities. A machine capable of learning and teaching may enhance a human's education to a degree, but it takes a human to best understand a human.
What does the development of artificial intelligence mean to you? How do you foresee it affecting your role in the library? How will education utilize intelligent technologies? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
William Davis here, the author of this post. As they exist today, librarians assist students in guiding them through the research process and helping them find and identify the highest quality materials. With a learning and teaching machine capable of completing the search for research materials - in a sense acting as the aggregator of quantity - the librarian’s role may shift to the aggregator - as well as the steward - of quality. Working alongside the digital entity to help students find the absolute best materials available for any given topic, as well as acting as an intermediary teacher of said materials.
ReplyDeleteThis subject always sparks a debate that never seems to come to a conclusion because of the greater implications that are at the core of this issue.
ReplyDeleteTechnology is not going to go away, businesses will always be looking at the bottom line, and regardless of morality or societal ethics; employing automation is always cheaper than employing humans in the long run.
Currently in this country, humans have to be paid at least $7.25 per hour while a machine only costs pennies worth of electricity per hour to run. Machines don’t get sleepy, don’t get tired, they don’t gossip on the job, waste time, or cause drama between each other. Machines don’t suffer from ennui, they don’t get bored or distracted, don’t need to take lunch breaks or smoke breaks, they don’t get sick or worse, pregnant, and have to take months away from work. If they ever do break down or become obsolete, their replacements don’t need to be trained on how to properly perform the jobs of their predecessors, they arrive already assembled and preinstalled with the necessary software. No mess, no fuss.
Automation is only getting better and cheaper as the years go by, and if you think that our current global Corpocratic systems, (that is—governments dominated by corporate business interests) will side with people over profits, you apparently haven’t been paying much attention for the past 100 years.
Technology taking over people’s jobs? Has science gone too far, or not far enough? On a long enough timeline these questions become moot.
Technology and automation WILL render people obsolete in almost every industry across the globe.
The question then becomes…
Do we, as species
a. simply let technology replace the jobs of millions of people who, through no fault of their own will soon be rendered obsolete, unemployable, and subsequently be thereafter impoverished and in financial ruin forever?
Or
b. embrace the inevitability of automation and allow it to lead to a shift in the fundamental structure of what we perceive as the purpose of our existence. Evolving from our current system that solely encourages the acquisition of wealth as the driving force behind human existence, to a new system: a global resource-based economy that promotes the betterment of the individual and that of the entire species?