Comment Sympathy for librarians loss of relevance... (Score 1) 45
Like your presentation but not your Subject--even though I had a couple of negative encounters with rule-based librarians recently.
Unfortunately I think libraries are losing there relevance and it's related to the AI reference in your FP. However I just started thinking about a more insidious version of the problem. You can say that it's a big problem that generative AIs will fabricate BS, but even when we realize an answer is BS, we may learn the wrong lesson from it. After all, many of the AI answers are pretty good (on the theory you can make sufficient allowance for your own tendency to believe what you want to believe), so there's a kind of reinforcement in favor of those questions and prompts. Most people like oracles and want to get "authoritative" answers to their questions.
Yet it's not so much that we may learn to think like machines (which is still a big problem), but rather that we may learn not to ask certain kinds of questions. We won't even be able to ask why those questions are so problematic because we already "know" the oracular AI can't handle them. (Even if the government or some greedy megalomaniac intervened to make sure the question was unanswerable.) Hallucinated books may the smallest of our future worries.
(Also a concern that reading is being crushed by cute cat videos, but out of time just now...)