Preprint article: Libraries, AI, and the Age of Consequences

Libraries, AI, and the Age of Consequences (preprint: html / PDF) is the title of an invited article I’ve just completed for the MDPI journal Future Collections, Libraries, Archives, Museums.

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, and while it follows the “Age of Consequences” logic/rationale that I’ve been working on for the last year or so this paper is unique in two regards.

First, in addition to the other drivers of revolution, rupture, and Consequences I’ve been putting on the table (climate, biodiversity, AI & computer science, biotech…), I try to document and weave together instances in which libraries, museums, and other memory/knowledge institutions are under assault in the USA and abroad; and second, I’ve gone a little deeper into my working hypothesis about the ways in which AI is “driving a wedge” between librarians and citizens/learners; and how library leaders and practitioners can avoid a series of “thinking traps” that are, in my experience, interfering with our strategic sense-making and foresight.

As I conclude:

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. 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.

This related essay, Youth, Megacities, and Culture in the Age of Consequences (Expanded Liverpool Thesis), is a preprint “author’s original manuscript” for a chapter in a forthcoming book about children’s museums. Here, I go deep on the drivers and consequences of rupture and revolution, including the importance of young people, megacities, and museums & cultural institutions as “places of appearance” (per Hannah Arendt).