People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI. (Lauren Mesley - Blog Post #7)

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I just listened to what may have been one of the most profound podcasts I’ve ever heard. The podcast is called Your Undivided Attention and the episode I’m referring to is "People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI."

You should, of course, go listen to it, but one of the points the episode touches on is the fact that we do not currently have the language to meaningfully discuss the way that companion AI is impacting human relationships: “In the aughts, we were still talking about what cable television and sound bites did to erode our public discourse, but we should have been talking about filter bubbles. In the twenty-teens, we were still discussing filter bubbles, when we should have been discussing attention economy, and right now, we’re finally, finally able to discuss what the attention economy has done to all of us. But what we should be doing is building the capacity and vocabulary to talk about the next technological wave that’s about to hit us. And that’s AI.” Daniel Barcay, the host of this episode, goes on to say that while social media is trying to capture our attention, AI is actually trying to capture our emotions and relationships. 

But how does this relate to social media and libraries? We already know that the social media content that captures the most attention is the most emotional. But AI goes one step further by targeting our most basic human need: relationships. Barcay interviews MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, and what she says about this is really important: “People [are beginning] to measure their human relationships against the standard of what the machine can deliver.” She acknowledges that this can be very scary, but it also may be what gives us hope, because human relationships offer a lot more than what dialogue with a machine can offer, and that’s where I think libraries come in. 

Since the launch of the search engine, libraries have been serving patrons as more of a place to exist than a house of information. Public libraries specifically are spending most of their staff members’ time creating and running community building programs. As one of the last third spaces left, we have a duty to humanity to continue to be the place where relationships are built and strengthened. Libraries will be a key solution to the AI problem. We just have to get the word out, and that’s where social media can help.