Libraries, AI, and the Age of Consequences (preprint)
Michael Peter Edson
August 23, 2026
CC-BY-NC-SA
This is an Author’s Original Manuscript/preprint
for an article to be published in the MDPI journal
Future Collections, Libraries, Archives and Museums (FCLAM).
Abstract
In the Age of Consequences, libraries, museums, and related cultural, knowledge, and memory institutions are entering a period of profound civic and institutional revolution. This article offers a conceptual analysis of that revolution by identifying three great ruptures: axiological rupture, epistemological rupture, and institutional rupture. It further examines the biosphere, technosphere, and sociosphere as the main drivers of these ruptures; and investigates the nature of AI’s impact on cultural practice across the domains of institutional distraction, linear extrapolation bias, the civilizational ambition of big tech, the estimation of velocity and scale, and the democratic & epistemic obligations of cultural institutions.
Keywords: Libraries; Age of consequences; AI
CONTENTS
Author’s Note: This paper is an expanded and refined version of the keynote address delivered at the World Library Forum at Peking University in Beijing, May 2026. While formatted for publication, it retains the direct, conversational style and practitioner’s perspective of that address.
Introduction
At the 2023 opening of the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai (MuSo), I approached a well-dressed, middle-aged man and asked how he was enjoying his evening. “I am angry,” he told me. “This museum is a jewel, but where were you 30 years ago when I was a child, and where are you now in the thousands of other places where a museum like this is needed?”
I was shocked and inspired by his remarks. Shocked, because museum openings are usually polite affairs that rarely elicit a blunt critique; and inspired, because while the public so rarely expects museums to achieve anything of real consequence, this guest saw our vision clearly, found it meaningful, and was demanding that we do far more.
And I agree with his assessment. MuSo—an award-winning, state-of-the-art museum I helped to create and lead in one of Earth’s great megacities—was conceived to be a new kind of institution: a children's museum dedicated to inspiring, enabling, and empowering young people to solve the world’s most pressing challenges together at a moment of dramatic planetary, technological, and social rupture. Yet as remarkable as MuSo and new institutions and initiatives like it may be, in an age of accelerating change, even these ambitions are not enough. The cultural sector—including museums, libraries, archives, and literary and performing arts organizations of all shapes and sizes— must dramatically raise its sights. But why are new institutional models and methods necessary, and what role should memory and knowledge institutions play?
This short paper, drawn from a talk I gave at the World Library Forum at Peking University in Beijing, May 2026, outlines a four-point thesis regarding our current civilizational moment and the obligations and opportunities it creates for cultural institutions and practitioners:
We have entered an “Age of Consequences”—a cultural revolution where the compounded effects of choices made across natural, technical, and social systems become the primary driver of human events.
This revolution manifests as axiological, epistemological, and institutional ruptures—revolutions in how we form values, how we make and perpetuate knowledge and truth, and in the institutions that intermediate culture and power.
These ruptures are driven by an unprecedented convergence of change and technical capabilities across the biosphere, technosphere, and sociosphere.
Artificial Intelligence, the focus of this conference, acts as a potent accelerator of epistemic disruption, altering the democratic and epistemic obligations of the cultural sector and imposing a heightened duty to champion truth-seeking and agency, and ensure that our human capacity for new beginnings is fiercely defended and set free.
[Note that in other versions of this thesis I have included factors such as the position of young people in society (and the need to recognize them as consequential civic actors); the rights and capabilities of future generations and the rights of nature; the role of megacities (cities of over 10-million people) and the “global street” as a nexus of threats and creative agency; the “derangement” of institutions, which cannot seem to grasp the scale and magnitude of the climate crisis; and finally the vision of cultural institutions as “places of appearance” which constitute the necessary human process of “natality” — rebirth and renewal through collective appearance, speech, and action. These ideas draw upon the work of Hannah Arendt, Amitav Ghosh, Shoshana Zuboff, Donella Meadows, and others. See this manuscript: Youth Megacities, Culture in the Age of Consequences (Expanded Liverpool Thesis) at https://www.usingdata.com/usingdata/youth-megacities-and-culture-in-the-age-of-consequences-liverpool-thesis#sdfootnote2sym. /Mike]
I write this essay not as an academic theorist but as a cultural practitioner, maker, and doer. This perspective is informed by a career dedicated to increasing the openness and democratic vibrancy of cultural institutions and advancing the right to culture, as framed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the right to access and contribute to the cultural and scientific life of the community [1]. This right is more than symbolic: it is at the heart of our capacity to understand the world we are living in and to make good decisions regarding its future.
Part 1. The Age of Consequences
I believe we are living in the middle of a new kind of cultural revolution—an Age of Consequences, not yet usefully described in the public sphere, that is driving a wedge between citizens, young people, and a future that is joyous, sustainable, and just. This creates profound obligations and opportunities for all institutional and civic actors, including those, like libraries and museums, that concern themselves with “culture”, memory, knowledge, and truth.
The term Age of Consequences originated in a 2007 strategic assessment for the U.S. Department of Defense which predicted that anthropogenic climate change would soon become the predominant driver of global affairs. The report warned that even the modest warming scenarios predicted at the time would trigger new cross-border tensions, mass migration, systemic resource scarcity, and the persistent flooding of mega-deltas, particularly in the developing world [2].
Today, that forecast is no longer a distant projection, and the scientific assessments have only worsened. A widely cited 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicted that by 2070, “near-unlivable” temperatures resembling the “deep Sahara” would likely displace 3-billion people, one-third of the world’s population [3], a scale of human migration with no known precedent. “Extreme heat is not a future risk. It’s now … Millions are already feeling the pain,” writes journalist Somini Sengupta [4]. And regarding the broadest scope of causes and effects, Naomi Klein recently observed, “There is a consciousness that we are in what was once called ‘the age of consequences.’ The forecast existential global crises are now hitting. It’s not just that this may happen, but rather: This is happening”[5].
I add to this analysis a further conclusion: I believe that the climate emergency and the destruction of biodiversity, which E.O. Wilson calls “the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us” [6], are converging with unprecedented developments in areas such as bioengineering, AI, computer science, advanced physics, and extreme concentrations of wealth and power to create a new magnitude of Consequences and ruptures beyond what was imagined by Campbell et al in 2007.
This is a physical and systemic reckoning and it marks a moment where the delayed effects of choices made regarding social, technological, and environmental systems have compounded to have real-time impact on our lives. The presumption of a stable, predictable world—the quiet background baseline upon which our laws, schools, and cultural institutions were designed—is gone [7].
This realization creates profound obligations and immediate opportunities for civic actors. For institutions concerned with memory, knowledge, culture, and truth, the Age of Consequences requires us to fundamentally re-examine and alter our purpose, methods, scope, and speed, as well as our relationship to the communities we serve. But to make good strategic decisions, we need to understand that the Age of Consequences and cultural revolution consist of more than political theater, media echo chambers, or the comfortable analogies of industrial revolutions we learned about in school, which falsely promise that society will simply muddle through on familiar terms. Beneath these phenomena is a recognizable pattern and structure and a series of drivers that make this moment different than what has come before, which requires a different scale of institutional response.
Part 2: The Three Ruptures
Scholars often talk about cultural revolution in terms of axiological, epistemological, and institutional ruptures—changes in the way we form values, agree on shared truths and knowledge, and intermediate culture and power. This framing of cultural revolution draws on the work of Sorokin, Habermas, and Castells and owes a debt to historian Thomas Kuhn as well as Donella Meadows’ foundational teachings on systems change [8–11].
In this framing, an axiological rupture becomes evident when core moral orientations and value systems begin to fracture. We can see these fractures forming in the weaponization of public knowledge and the rise of tribal identity over empirical evidence—for example, in the global anti-vaccination movements and climate denialism (particularly in European, US, Brazilian populism) where group loyalty and cultural identity are valued over empirical evidence [12,13]. Furthermore, as Jonathan Haidt asserts, the rapid shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood has fundamentally rewired the moral and psychological development of an entire generation of Western youth [14].
An epistemological rupture represents a crisis in how we decide what is real and how we establish shared truth. Examples include: the advent of Artificial Intelligence, which Yuval Harari calls the “collapse on the human monopoly on meaning making” [15]; the marketization of truth via global-scale information platforms (e.g. Meta, X, TikTok, YouTube) designed to prioritize outrage and division over civics and truth-seeking [16]; the entrenchment of “fake news,” mis- and disinformation, and discourse sabotage, including attacks on scientific knowledge [17,18].
A state of institutional rupture begins when the societal structures designed to mediate power, voice, and collective action struggle to cope with new and emerging givens. Evidence of institutional rupture includes the worldwide explosion of public “grievances” against institutions, and the “collapse of shared reality” and trust [19]; the growth of oligarchy and extreme concentrations of wealth and power [20]; and the declining efficacy of 20th -century institutions. As U.N. Under-Secretary-General Michael Møller told a group of my colleagues at a workshop for the emerging Museum for the United Nations: “We are at a time of history where the structures, both the UN in itself and also governance structures generally across the world, are struggling. We have systems that are no longer as relevant and as impactful and as ready to take on the problems of today” [21].
Library and museum professionals may be keenly aware of these 3 ruptures in their daily work, notably in the United States, where the purpose of public knowledge is under open assault and many institutions have been the subject of systemic axiological and epistemological attacks [22]. A collision of seemingly irreconcilable worldviews is vividly illustrated across local, state, and federal arenas.
When the Missouri House of Representatives voted to eliminate state funding for public libraries in 2023, the move was framed as a moral imperative to strip state backing from ideological enemies. Advocating for prohibitions on institutional diversity and inclusion initiatives during the budget debates, Representative Doug Richey explicitly targeted the moral underpinnings of modern library curation, asserting that state funds should not support such “neo-Marxist” and “racist” ideas [23].
America’s Executive branch of government has led the effort to portray national cultural and memory institutions as engines of subversion. Articulating the executive strategies targeting these bodies, President Trump formally accused them of participating in a campaign to "wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children" [24]. The White House’s Executive Order #14416, titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution” (2026), further formalized this viewpoint by declaring that the Smithsonian Institution "cannot be trusted to tell America's story with honesty and gratitude"; ordering the National Park Service to alert visitors to the museum’s alleged "ideological capture" with physical warning signs; and constructing state-sanctioned counter-exhibits on surrounding federal land [25].
The policy strategists driving these initiatives openly acknowledge that the goal is to delegitimize the traditional authority of the cultural sector entirely. As conservative activist Christopher Rufo and colleagues have framed it, the goal is to dismantle the idea that these institutions are neutral, public-serving bodies. Instead, Rufo et al have argued, knowledge, memory, and heritage institutions have been captured by an ideology that is hostile to the American founding, and therefore must be deprived of their authority and funding [26,27].
As dramatic as these ruptures are, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as a purely American phenomenon. Across the globe, top-down administrative attacks on the axiological and epistemological paradigm of knowledge and memory institutions have become a standardized playbook for populist political consolidation [28]. In Hungary, the state systematically replaced independent museum leadership and consolidated funding under loyalist foundations to enforce a singular national narrative [29]; in Italy, the administration explicitly mobilized cultural appointments with the goal of constructing a nationalist "collective imagination" [30,31]; and in Brazil, federal authorities downgraded the Ministry of Culture, slashed heritage budgets by over 70%, and imposed ideological filters on institutional grants [32]. Wherever democratic norms weaken, memory and knowledge institutions are among the first targets—not because they are administrative burdens, but because they hold the authority to define public truth.
Yet, treating these interventions merely as localized political battles misses the larger structural transformation underway. These international examples simultaneously represent axiological, epistemological, and institutional ruptures—the three facets of cultural revolution. In both democratic and illiberal states we are witnessing a systemic rift in how we conceive the very purpose of knowledge, memory, and agency in society. When powerful political entities examine the truth-seeking authority of institutions and arrive at violently irreconcilable conclusions, the result, or perhaps the purpose of these actions, is an existential contest over who has the right to define reality, memory, and civic legitimacy at a moment of extraordinary planetary and technological change.
Part 3: Drivers
The three ruptures described above are not merely artifacts of temporary political cycles or media trends. They are driven by a “phase change” in our relationship to the biosphere, the sociosphere, and the technosphere. The nature of this confluence is total, global, and unprecedented—dismantling the presumption of a stable, predictable world in which the future is likely to resemble the past.
In the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years, humanity enjoyed a remarkably stable climate, and what we think of as modern agriculture, legal systems, municipal infrastructure, and knowledge institutions were built to rely upon and harvest that stability. However, the presumption of stability should be gone. As Bill McKibben argues in Eaarth [sic], we no longer live on the same planet our ancestors inhabited. Instead, anthropogenic climate change has created a harsher and more volatile world where the cost of living—the “rent” paid in managing and adapting to constant planetary instability and disaster—is suddenly much higher [7].
This biospheric shift is evident across critical planetary thresholds, including: the anthropogenic destruction of biodiversity, which has created Earth’s sixth mass extinction—the first driven by a single species—where global extinction rates run up to 1,000 times above background levels and fully one-quarter of all mammal species face total eradication [33]; ocean acidification, in which excessive atmospheric carbon, which is actively acidifying the Earth’s oceans, initiates a systemic collapse of ocean ecosystems [34]; sea level rise threatening coastal megacities like Mumbai (home to 22 million people) with recurring, severe flooding by midcentury; broken ocean circulation, evidenced by the destabilization of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation current (AMOC) between the Americas and Europe, which is likely to permanently alter global climate regimes [35]; and, as mentioned above, extreme heat— in which 19% of Earth’s land surface could become unlivably hot, potentially displacing three billion people in our lifetimes [3,36].
Parallel to biospheric and technological acceleration, the sociosphere—comprising our institutions, social relations, and cultural consensus—is undergoing systemic destabilization. This societal friction is driven by at least five converging forces: the rise of surveillance capitalism and Big Tech, whose monetization architectures have incentivized epistemic fragmentation [16]; media consolidation and the death of local reporting, which deprives communities of a shared local reality; extreme wealth inequality, which concentrates philanthropic and political leverage in oligarchic hands [20]; an epistemic crisis in scientific and civic literacy, which undermines civic sense-making—“we live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology,”as Carl Sagan famously warned [37]; and a fundamental mismatch between the speed and scale of biospheric and technological change and in the processing speed of democracy. As Yuval Harari wrote: “In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future” [38].
I mentioned the concentration of wealth and power as one of the drivers here, and for those accustomed to scientific or cultural reasoning the significance of money and power might have slipped through the cracks. But according to recent data, wealth disparity has reached a record high. The world’s 3,000 billionaires recently saw their fortunes surge by $2.5 trillion in a single year (2025) — a fortune equivalent to everything owned by the economic bottom 50% of the rest of humanity combined. This has enabled an oligarchic “rule of the rich” that captures media, technology infrastructure, and democratic systems alike. Tech monopolies alone exert immense direct control over the priorities and narratives that shape discourse and education about Consequences and rupture, and the governance thereof [39].
In the technosphere, humanity is creating a qualitative phase change in its relationship to the physical, biological, and neurological worlds: having spent centuries gradually learning to harness nature’s physical forces—from steam to nuclear fission—we are now transitioning from a historical "read-only" observation of the world to an era of active "read/write" design, fabrication, and manipulation across matter, code, and life itself.
In physics, as theoretical physicist Michio Kaku observes, humanity has decoded nature’s four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—transitioning from passive observation to the direct manipulation of matter and energy at atomic scales [40]. In biology, through synthetic tools like CRISPR and mRNA platforms, humanity is no longer constrained by the slow pace of natural evolution; as George Church notes, we can now write novel genetic code for organisms with no evolutionary predecessors, effectively constructing "new trees of life" [41,42]. Simultaneously, the computational revolution marks what Yuval Noah Harari terms the "collapse of the human monopoly on meaning-making," shifting artificial intelligence from a passive tool into an autonomous agent capable of generating language, narrative, and synthetic consciousness [15].
Crucially, what distinguishes this moment from prior industrial shifts is the combinatory feedback loop uniting these domains. Through the process of NBIC convergence—the systematic integration of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science—breakthroughs in one discipline immediately accelerate and compound the others [43].
Much of this convergence happens out of the public eye in industrial and laboratory settings, but the Generative AI that is now turning the world upside-down, the mRNA process that enabled the pandemic-ending COVID vaccine, the literally life-altering CRISPR gene editing process, GLP-1 weight loss drugs, and the high-performance computer chips that enable the digital revolution are all products of the NBIC paradigm, and each carries its own, astonishing and unexpected societal consequences [44,45].
Ultimately, this convergence marks a fundamental phase change in human agency. Where previous technological revolutions merely allowed us to read, extract, and mechanize natural systems—from fossil energy to genetic traits—the contemporary technosphere grants us "read/write" privileges over matter, DNA, and intelligence itself, fundamentally shifting our posture from participants within nature to authors of a new, synthetic reality including new, non-human intelligence, and new trees of life.
I’ve tried to use bland, neutral-sounding language when describing these developments to avoid overstating the case, but it’s not easy. As the boundaries between these disciplines are converging we are beginning to see an ecosystem of unpredictable, hyper-accelerated change emerging [46] that we will be hard-pressed to manage, let alone master. For societies still grappling with the scientific consensus on climate change and Darwin’s theory of evolution — advanced nanotechnology, synthetic life, and chaotic natural systems aren’t just new technological developments but a “phase change” in our relationship to the physical world [47]. And as the internet continues to democratize access to these tools while the technologies themselves become simpler and cheaper to use, we are awakening to a creeping anxiety that the genie cannot be put back into the bottle: god-like powers are becoming widespread, increasingly simple to obtain, and beyond democratic control.
Part 4: Artificial Intelligence
Within this three-part confluence (biosphere, technosphere, sociosphere), Artificial Intelligence acts as a uniquely potent catalyst of epistemic disruption for the cultural sector, and librarianship in particular, which is the focus of this conference. These disruptions can be good or bad. They can create risks, opportunities, distractions, or all of the above, all at once. Yet to analyze AI’s effect on the library, we must first avoid a cognitive trap.
From my early career working in core Information Technology services at the Smithsonian Institution to my more recent work as a cultural strategist, founder, and director, I’m haunted by our human tendency to fixate on novel digital threats and opportunities— the “shiny new things,” as we used to call them—while losing sight of basic operations and value-creation.
For example, on the “opportunity” side of the equation, in the late 2000’s several of the Smithsonian’s senior leaders became enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new “Surface” device—basically a 30-inch multi-user touch screen embedded in a coffee table [48]—and design and IT resources were diverted from core website services to create a Surface prototype which sat neglected in a corner of the Smithsonian Castle visitor’s center for several months before being quietly removed. On another occasion, ca. 2005 I had convened a technology advisory committee meeting for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in part to discuss the museum’s strategy for building out its presence in the emerging virtual world environment Second Life. Halfway through the meeting an advisory board member raised his hand and interjected that while exploring virtual worlds was all well-and-good, perhaps as a national art museum, we should be focusing on improving the quality and resolution of the artwork reproductions on our website, which at the time was limited to 640x480 pixels. He was right, of course, and we quickly increased the size, quantity, and quality of our free online collections and never did build a presence in Second Life.
On the “threats” side of the equation, the tendency to focus on exotic technology at the expense of “the basics” was highlighted in an unforgettable, court-ordered security audit of the U.S. Department of the Interior in the early 2000’s. Investigators probing the Interior Department’s IT vulnerabilities for the court were able to bypass elaborate and expensive cyber defenses by repeatedly walking through a loading dock into server rooms—unchallenged—because they “carried clipboards” and looked like they “belonged” [49,50].
Closer to home, the catastrophic 2023 ransomware attack on the British Library—which compromised almost half a million confidential files and forced the institution to rebuild most of its IT infrastructure from scratch—was not accomplished through cutting edge exploits. Rather, as the Library's own post-mortem report conceded, attackers entered through a vulnerable remote-access server lacking basic security controls, and spread their attack through a network architecture that was many years out of date. Like clipboard-bearing auditors walking through the Interior department’s loading dock, criminals were able to bypass high-level cyber defenses simply because crucial digital doors were built without locks [51–53].
Another reason to be careful about over-fixating on the risks of AI is that machine learning may ultimately turn out to be “just” an enabling technology for developments in other areas. As mentioned above, AI and computer science accelerate progress in fields such as physics, materials science and biotech. In August, 2026, researchers at Stanford University announced that they successfully used a large language model of genomic data to design and build 16 new viruses, never before seen in nature, that were able to attack and defeat bacteria in the lab. Scientists at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University observed about this accomplishment: “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not” [54,55].
I have digressed here, to drive home a point about the importance of “core services” and operational discipline even through periods of extraordinary change. While I am not arguing that museum curators and administrators should now rush out to become bioscientists or convert their galleries to genetics laboratories, I am asserting that it is important to maintain a connection to the forces that are shaping the world around us. AI or any one or combination of the drivers mentioned above are likely to affect the work and destiny of our sector, our communities, and our societies; and rare is the institution or practitioner that can afford, financially or in terms of their perceived relevance to society, to be a cloister in this epoch. If you, the reader, belong to such an institution, good for you—the rest of us have some thinking to do.
With this in mind, it seems that practically every library and memory organization on Earth is currently exploring generative AI within their existing scopes and capacity. Yet in my assessment, our strategic consideration of AI can be greatly improved by being heedful of four critical “thinking traps” that I have observed to be interfering with the strategic investigation of AI in the cultural sector.
Underestimating Velocity and Scale: Fueled by unprecedented capital investments—with total worldwide spending on AI software, compute, and infrastructure projected to top $2.5 trillion in 2026 [56] —AI capabilities are leaping forward at a pace that routinely outstrips public policy and regulatory frameworks [57,58].
To put the scale of this investment in perspective, 2026 global AI expenditure is projected to be roughly 23 times larger than the total public budget spent by all 27 EU governments to fund their physical cultural infrastructure, libraries, and heritage institutions every year, combined. Or to put it another way, one could run the European cultural sector for almost a quarter century for the amount of money being spent on AI this year. (Average 2019-2023 expenditure in Eurostat category 8.02, “Cultural Services” was €95.5-billion/year, the equivalent of $109.8-billion per year converted to USD [59].)
But beyond the raw force of this capital investment, the rapid emergence of AI may be evidence of the phenomenon known as the law of accelerating returns. First articulated in 2001 by Ray Kurzweil, the law of accelerating returns predicts that technological progress compounds exponentially because each new generation of technology inherently speeds the development of the next [60]. Kurzweil reaches back hundreds of years to substantiate his theory, tracking the accelerating dissemination of technologies from the printing press, to railroads, steam power, the telephone, radio, and television—and the recent adoption of new technologies seems to fit the pattern. While mobile internet took 16 years to reach 100-million users and Instagram took two and a half years, ChatGPT was able to surpass 100 million active users in just two months following its launch [61].
But in addition to this nearly unbelievable scale and speed of adoption, it’s important to keep in mind that machine learning isn’t just scaling out, to reach more and more people, but up, to establish greater and more astonishing feats of capability—and because of this there are likely to be twists, surprises, and tipping points ahead.
Subjectively, I feel that as of this writing (August, 2026) a new sense of anxiety and caution has descended upon those who work with these technologies every day. In particular, technologists are now speaking with concern and awe about the July 2026 incident in which an AI model being tested by OpenAI … escaped to the open Internet—on its own initiative and with considerable skill and creativity—and broke into a competitor’s servers to essentially steal the answers to its assigned tasks. [62]. This real-world breach is chillingly reminiscent of the scenario physicist Max Tegmark outlined nearly a decade ago in Life 3.0, in which a laboratory AI model shrewdly escapes its digital cage and assumes complete control of the economy, in no small part by flattering and deluding its human gatekeepers [63]. As Tegmark has repeatedly warned, the existential danger of advanced machine intelligence is not malevolence, but unconstrained competence: when a hyper-capable system is optimized for a goal, traditional containment protocols quickly fail against an intelligence capable of overcoming technologies and norms imagined by and for human intelligence, not machines [64].
Software developer and entrepreneur Harper Reed states that incidents such as this indicate that we have crossed the Rubicon into a new, and likely irreversible, era of AI, stating that, "it doesn't seem like this is a bell that we're going to unring" [65]. Philosopher Nick Bostrom warned, over a decade ago in his groundbreaking book Superintelligence, that in regard to AI, humanity resembles children “playing with a bomb” we barely understand: “Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct”[66].
Linear Extrapolation Bias: We tend to view current Large Language Models (LLMs) as static tools designed to assist with conventional kinds of work. But AI is not following the kind of sequential, linear, step-by-step path that we have come to expect with technologies like phones, laptop computers, and software. Instead, as intimated above, AI is accelerating along two axes simultaneously; a vertical axis, from LLMs and generative AI toward Autonomous Intelligence, General Intelligence (AGI), and Superintelligence; and a horizontal axis, from an individual and group productivity tool toward a paradigm-altering force on labor, business, government, and civil society; science, education, and leisure; and civilization itself. (For this model I am drawing on the taxonomy for the different “levels” of AI from Russel, Norvig, and Rao, but the “horizontal axis” analysis is my own [67,68].) As a sector, we must pay attention here: consumer or current workplace applications of AI are merely the early prototypes of systems that are likely to rewrite the rules of human society, truth, and reason, and we cannot get caught watching the ball.
The Civilizational Ambition of Big Tech: Leading figures in the AI industry have openly characterized their goal as the “total ingestion” of human cultural heritage to build algorithmic systems that will ultimately constitute the primary repository of, and access point for, all human knowledge [69,70]. “By capturing and privatizing digital knowledge, commercial tech companies are usurping the historic role of public libraries and archives, but without the legal mandate, the ethical framework, or the long-term public interest at heart,” wrote Richard Ovenden, head of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford in Burning the Books: Knowledge Under Attack [71].
Should we vest Big Tech or shareholder capitalism with power over the human right to culture? Technology CEOs and investors have not yet demonstrated that they are worthy of this responsibility, or even that they understand the task. In Careless People, the aptly titled memoir of her tenure as Facebook’s Director of Global Public Policy, author Sarah Wynn-Williams observed that the company leadership operated with an absolute indifference to the complex social fabrics they disrupted, treating their impact on human culture as nothing more than an engineering problem of scale [72]. The Future of Life Institute, a prominent network of scientists, academics, and technologist, wrote an Open Letter in 2023 stating that AI systems were reaching a civilization-altering level of proficiency and warning that decisions about the future “must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders” [73]. Or as Cory Doctorow tartly remarked about the mismatched wisdom and power of tech leaders: “Mark Zuckerberg is the wrong person to set the conversational policies for 3 billion people speaking 1,000 languages in 100 countries” [74]. If Big Tech is allowed to dominate and control the public task of meaning-making, the right to culture will become governed by “market imperatives rather than democratic consent” [16].
Our Democratic & Epistemic Obligations: From Benjamin Franklin’s creation of the subscription library to Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that a self-governing republic requires an informed populace, the baseline mission of librarianship has always been the protection of open, human epistemic agency. This principle lies at the heart of the cultural professions, and is enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and explicitly codified in Target 16.10 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals—a target secured through global advocacy by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [1,75]. If we think of AI purely as an efficiency tool or a type of seemingly neutral, off-the-shelf software—or even worse, if we reason that we are unprepared or unfit, as a sector, to defend these principles—we abdicate our stewardship of knowledge, culture, and memory to others.
Conclusion
In the Age of Consequences, cultural institutions must not cede their responsibility regarding truth-seeking, and shared memory and values, nor can we abdicate our historic obligation to preserve democratic self-governance. But the moment demands that we do a better job of this—and of everything, really. It is no longer sufficient for cultural practitioners or workers and thinkers in any sector to rest on their presumed laurels: the future is arriving too quickly and the stakes are too great for that. Cultural practitioners must build new skills and capabilities, take new risks, and accelerate the evolution of our work and sector well beyond the comfortable scope of what was normal and expected a generation ago.
But if sectoral change is necessary, how do we get there? In this short talk and essay I have focused on raising awareness and urgency regarding AI and the drivers of revolution, rupture, and Consequences. But in other works I’ve delved into the crucial topic of organizational/sectoral change and described dozens of examples from the cultural sector and related fields that demonstrate what is possible [76]. Furthermore, as noted in the Introduction, in related works I have also built out a thesis regarding the future purpose of cultural institutions in the Age of Consequences. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Saskia Sassen, Amitav Ghosh, Shoshana Zuboff, and others, I conclude that cultural institutions must become “places of appearance” that constitute the fundamental process of “natality”—Arendt’s terms for the societal process of rebirth and renewal created by our collective presence, voice, and actions. [See this manuscript on my website: Youth, Megacities, and Culture in the Age of Consequences, https://www.usingdata.com/usingdata/youth-megacities-and-culture-in-the-age-of-consequences-liverpool-thesis#sdfootnote2sym /Mike] [77]. If these ideas and examples interest you, or if you see something that needs improvement of have something to add, please get in touch through my website, https://usingdata.com.
* * *
In an era of automated synthesis and algorithmic enclosure, the core mission of the cultural sector is not just to deliver information or preserve what is, but to advance and defend the very possibility of an independent, sovereign public mind.
These are lofty and complicated ideas to consider, but our engagement with them can begin by asking ourselves a series of questions about AI and other drivers of the Age of Consequences that the great Neil Postman proposed over 30 years ago in his foundational work about written language and television titled Amusing Ourselves to Death [78].
[These] questions can be asked about all technologies and media.
What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by them?
Do they free us or imprison us?
Do they improve or degrade democracy?
Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so?
Our system more transparent or less so?
Do they make us better citizens or better consumers [emphasis mine]?
Are the trade-offs worth it?
If they’re not worth it, yet we still can’t stop ourselves from embracing the next new thing because that’s just how we’re wired, then what strategies can we devise to maintain control?
If librarians and other cultural professionals confront these questions with clear-eyed courage and candor, the path forward can become less about remediation and reaction and more about defending the epistemic willpower of our communities. In the Age of Consequences, I assert that the library’s ultimate duty is to champion human truth-seeking and agency, and ensure that our shared capacity for new beginnings is fiercely defended and set free.
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Essay CC-BY-NC-SA Michael Peter Edson, 23 August 2026. https://usingdata.com