Science & Technology · · C.B. Greenberg
Artificial Intelligence and Libraries
AI has put us at an inflection point in how the world works. Libraries can raise consciousness about this next societal change.
On the Sunday evening of April 16, CBS’s long-running “60 Minutes” newsmagazine may have outdone itself again with a feature story about artificial intelligence. Scott Pelley was the interviewer and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, a very articulate interviewee. For Scott Pelley this peek into Google and “chatbox” algorithmic technology was clearly a jaw-dropping story. For this writer, little more expert on the subject than Pelley, it was of a piece with a book only recently read, “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World,” by Max Fisher (2022). Both are about algorithms and how they are used to so quickly synthesize new information, sometimes for truth and positive informational purposes, sometimes for conspiracy dissemination, sometimes f…