knowledge management and library professionals.”
It goes on to point out that: “The fun- damental strength of information pro- fessionals in taking up the opportunities created by AI is that they align to roles they already play. The more similar to traditional roles new activities are, the more probable the competencies already exist; and the more likely that other stakeholders immediately under- stand that there is a role for information professionals.”
While there is a natural fit for infor- mation professionals’ skillset, there is still a need to engage and ensure those skills can be transferred successfully and become embedded as core skills for the future.
Andrew says: “AI means many things. It’s the idea of machines that think in- dependently. That idea has been around quite a long time but its meaning is still evolving. It is the stuff of science fiction utopia and dystopia. AI is also defined in the promises we read on glossy web sites from tech companies. But AI can also be seen as part of a global industri- al system that consumes a vast amount of raw materials, energy and human labour.
“In a more mundane sense it is the term is being applied to technological function- ality like auto-correct, auto-suggest or translate tools that are making our daily knowledge work easier. In a technical sense at the moment it is also being defined through a cluster of technologies that enable computers to do more with unstructured text or speech, especially machine learning.”
The report looks to answer three June 2021 Andrew Cox.
fundamental questions about AI and its relationship to the work of informa- tion professionals, and information and knowledge services.
1. How do we ensure that today’s work- force has the skills and understanding they need in order to enable them to support their users in participating safely and successfully in a modern world that is increasingly powered by artificial intel- ligence (AI), machine learning, process automation and robotics?
2. What are the ethical implications of our approach to these technologies – how can we deploy the existing ethical framework for librarians and ensure that it aligns to emerging work on Data Ethics and responsible technology?
3. What should the skillset of the future workforce look like and what is the cur- riculum by which we will ensure that the next generation of information profes- sionals have the skills to keep pace with
future developments in technology?
Crucially, AI is still developing and that means there is lots of scope for informa- tion professionals to influence and shape how it is implemented in their context. Andrew adds that there is already a need for information professionals to engage with AI, so that they can raise awareness with users and give them the critical skills needed to engage with it.
He says: “AI means multiple things and has multiple applications – the report seeks to make it much clearer what they are. Google uses AI. So some of what we have been doing for a while has been helping people understand about AI in search, for example when we prompt peo- ple to question the results they get. The same approach of asking questions about how things work and how far they can be trusted applies to AI in other contexts. “Other applications of AI, such as chat- bots, are widely used in certain industries, such as marketing, but do not seem to have been much developed yet for infor-
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