Print

Introduction: A Pace a Pace Librarians have sometimes been referred to as two-­ legged encyclopedias of super- ficial information. While many of us do seem to have an inordinate fondness for trivia, it’s prob­ably ­ because so many of us practice our profession as generalists in public and school libraries. The questions ­ we’ve been peppered with over the years can easily be scaled from trivial to essential, with numerous ones categorized as downright wacky. I am willing to bet, however, that a ­ little frisson of fear went down the spines of many of us on February 16, 2011, when we watched former all-­ time Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings beaten by an IBM form of artificial intel- ligence embodied in the appellation Watson (Markoff). Mr. Jennings ­ really did not have a chance, and neither would any of us. Watson had access to 200 million pages of content and contained four terabytes of memory (Kaplan 31). Five years past with all of us busy learning and adapting to new technologies and, ­because it was not televised with all the hoopla it deserved, we ­ were unaware of the next technological leap. On February 16, 2016, Lee Sedol, the top Go player in the world, was defeated by Google’s AlphaGo, another form of artificial intel- ligence (Moyer). This win was definitely the one that should have made us sit up and take notice. Go is an ancient Chinese game where players place white or black stones, depending upon their chosen side, at the intersections of a 19 × 19 grid. The goal is to remove the freedom of your opponent’s stones by surrounding them and have them taken from the board. The player with the most captured territory wins (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 1). Although Go is a game of strategy, profes- sional players find it challenging to explain their moves ­ because they are intuitive in nature. Unlike chess, which has published gambits that players can master, Go players cannot easily articulate their moves. Whereas Watson was loaded with millions of facts, AlphaGo was structured on a neural network modeling how the ­ human brain works. Google engineers designed a system that enabled AlphaGo to learn on its own. It had to detect subtle patterns in large amounts of data and make connections to winning moves (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 3–4). The questions that Watson’s and AlphaGo’s victories pose are valid ones. How ­ will artificial intelligence (A.I.) affect school librarians? What routine tasks can be easily and more eco­ nom­ ically performed by A.I.? ­ Will school librarians’ positions become redundant? Alvin Toffler published a ground-­ breaking book in 1970 titled, ­Future Shock, in which he described a syndrome of disorientation caused by rapid technological