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Introduction
Following several years of intense activity around big data, there has been a surge of interest in AI. For example, in the UK, reports by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2016) on AI and by the Royal Society (2017) specifically on Machine Learning have been followed by the publication of findings of a House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (2018). Artificial intelligence (AI) has come into public awareness through maturing consumer products that use voice recognition, such as Siri, and high profile innovations, such as smart cars (Tredinnick, 2017). Political interest in AI, motivated by its potential to raise productivity and stimulate economic growth, has been coupled with societal “AI anxiety” about the impact on jobs and social equality, and with a growing awareness of the risks to privacy (Johnson and Verdicchio, 2017). A Price Waterhouse Cooper report of 2017 found 54 per cent of senior executives were planning to make major strategic investment in AI, but most thought their organisation currently lacked relevant skills (quoted Rao, 2017) pointing to another important issue, one echoed by Gartner (Andrews and Austin, 2018).
AI has a long history of development, but it seems to be on the cusp of a breakthrough in application. Some information sectors such as law are already starting to see a significant impact (Smith, 2016; Chen and Neary, 2017). The likely effects on academic libraries are unclear, however. In some senses, AI has already had effects here, e.g. changes to search and discovery, experiments with chatbots and work supporting Text and Data Mining; though these are rarely understood as interconnected changes. That there will be further impacts on libraries seems inevitable. Fernandez (2016, p. 22), for instance, goes as far as to say, “For libraries the question is not so much what technology will be affected, but rather what technology, if any, will remain unaffected by AI”.
In a 2017 survey of librarians from across all sectors in the USA, Wood and Evans (2018) found that 56.3 per cent of respondents thought supercomputers, like Watson, could transform librarianship. This still meant that 44 per cent thought it would have no or not much effect. Furthermore, most thought it would be 30 years before supercomputers would be in...