Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important issues of our time … and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. Whether for good or for ill, it will likely impact virtually every facet of our society (technology, culture, jobs, wealth, poverty, politics, environment, democracy, education, psychology, and more) …
Message #1: A story —
I began my career as a librarian and faculty member at a small private college in the midwestern United States in 1986. At that time, the work of the library and the work of the campus was almost entirely paper-based. There was no email; we used electric typewriters (and pens and pencils) to create documents; the chief classroom technology was the overhead, wheeling a television into a classroom seemed exotic, films were shown on portable screens and reel-to-reel equipment; microfilm and bulky machines that allowed use of the microfilm took up a good amount of library space.
We sent messages–routine and complex–on sheets of paper in envelopes through hand-delivered campus mail. We used the telephone–land line phones–and answering machines.
Students and faculty searched paper indexes and abstracts to find journal articles … and then went to the stacks to find those articles in print journals … and then often went to the big copy machine. They used a card catalog (with paper cards) to identify books–and then went to the stacks to find those print books on the shelves …
And then the books were checked out manually using a card in a pocket inside the back cover–and the due date was stamped on a sheet pasted in the back by the pocket.
Digital/electronic technology in the library was just beginning. In our library, it came first in the form of searching databases electronically via a product called DIALOG using a Texas Instruments teletype machine, dot matrix printing on large sheets of paper, and a telephone coupler.
Personal computers existed; I had used them in graduate school, but it would be several years before I used them in my job at the college.
In the late 1980’s, a few schools in our state began to explore public connections to the Internet. My college got its public Internet connection in February 1992–we were the fifth college/university in our state to do so. By the mid 1990’s, most higher education institutions and a growing number of public libraries in our state had Internet connections.
At our college, starting in the late 1980’s, it was the Library and the Computer Science Department that chiefly advocated for the connection. But, it took time and there was resistance. I can remember an administrator saying that he did not think we needed an Internet connection at the college, that faculty and students would not make use of it. He was wrong …
I can remember placing piles of one-page paper handouts in division assistant offices that morning in February 1992; the handouts listed ten things that faculty could do and access through the Internet. Among the ten were links to library catalogs at large universities, access to Mother Jones, and access to the text of famous speeches.
Further, in the next few years, the Library took the lead on campus holding workshops on Internet resources and HTML training for faculty and staff. We even put together one of the first campus Internet interfaces–using the list-based Gopher.
Back then (late 1980’s and early 1990’s), the Internet had not yet been taken over by large corporate interests. It was 1993-1994 with the first graphical interface and the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) that the Internet moved beyond largely academic and research circles and began its long and explosive growth as an avenue for the general public, advertising, and business.
Fast forward another 30-some years and today–toward the end of my career–has come the emergence of a public form of Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT in November 2022 and, since then, a veritable avalanche of AI tools, applications, and companies.
The Internet became a transformative technology for individuals and collectively for society after it emerged into the public sphere in the 1980’s and 1990’s. AI is another transformative technology. Being “transformative”, however, does not immediately make a technology all good or all bad. Human beings and human society do not move at the speed of technological change. Individuals and society require time to accept, reject, and adapt to change. What is good and what is bad about the technology follows from that. And even with that time, history tells us that large technological changes even started largely with the best of motives and that, in the end, do some beneficial things also cause plenty of widespread pain, upheaval, and discord along the way.
A stark and crucial difference between today with AI and the Internet of the 1980’s and early 1990’s is that “public” AI has been uniformly introduced by huge technology companies run by incredibly wealthy individuals. The obvious air of avarice and power-seeking that has accompanied this roll-out has almost overshadowed the technology itself. AI has been forced upon our society in tune, in the United States, with a receptive authoritarian political establishment (as of 2026). It sparks easy comparison to dystopian novels like George Orwell’s 1984.
The early years of the public Internet that allowed some time for experimentation and reflection to see in what ways the technology might actually benefit the education enterprise (and society in general) seem quaint and almost unbelievable today. And even back then, there were plenty of signs by the mid to especially later 1990’s of the many societal downsides of corporate control of the Internet.
Today (2026) with AI, there has been and is no time for that experimentation and reasoning (according to the big tech companies and the federal government), unless institutions and individuals have been brave enough to make the decision to step back and go slow. Most tech companies and the federal government assert loudly that AI cannot be regulated; that we must push forward with no checks in a frantic race to win … what exactly? And what will it cost (economically, environmentally, personally) to get to wherever we are going? Is it just more profits, more greed, more power for the few? Is that the end game?
So what does an old librarian think about AI?
In the world of the library and higher education, yes, there are some things AI can do probably as well and certainly faster than before–for example, analyzing large amounts of data, a certain level of computer programming, and searching for and finding information more quickly in ways not possible before.
But, all of that depends upon the database, the block of information being searched and analyzed. If the database is composed of biased and incorrect information and/or if the assumptions behind the analysis are faulty, the results of the search or the analysis won’t be any better. This is not new. “Garbage in, garbage out” has always been a reality.
And AI–for searching–is not really new either. It is another step (but a big step) in a steady evolution of searching tools and techniques going back decades. AI does allow for the construction of prompts that limit and guide searches in ways that were not possible before.
The story of how AI is impacting education is ongoing and very uneven. It is a challenge and a stress at a time when primary and secondary education in the United States are facing many other big challenges–demographic, financial, political.
At a time when education is often portrayed as an enemy by an authoritarian political structure, there has never been a greater need for a broad and open education. Education, especially at the college level, should be “hard”; it should challenge assumptions and prescripted ways of thinking. Educated people should have the capacity for independent reasoning and thought; they should make their own decisions. They should be able to read and evaluate critically and write effectively; they should be able to communicate ideas understandably to a wide audience. An educated person should have the ability to gain genuine understanding of an issue, a topic, a subject.
And none of these capabilities should be offloaded to AI.
Thank you!
Kevin
Other sources:
Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle (The Conversation)
AI, social media, the Internet and how we experience the world; what is real? what are the impacts?
