Libraries of
the future are going to change in some unexpected ways
Your idea of a
library might be a musty, carpeted room with outdated technology, but don't
ditch your library card just yet.
According
to David Pescovitz, co-editor at Boing Boing and research director at the Institute
for the Future, a Palo Alto-based collective that makes forecasts
about our world, it's likely in the coming decades that society's traditional
understanding of a library will get completely upended.
In
50 years' time, Pescovitz tells Business Insider, libraries are poised to
become all-in-one spaces for learning, consuming, sharing, creating, and
experiencing - to the extent that enormous banks of data will allow people to
"check out" brand-new realities, whether that's scaling Mt. Everest
or living out an afternoon as a dog.
To
understand how libraries will change by the mid-21st century, Pescovitz says
people need to understand what function they currently serve. At their core,
libraries in the information age provide a public means of accessing knowledge,
he says. That's what people crave.
The
hallmark of future libraries, meanwhile, will be hyper-connectivity. They'll
reflect our increasing reliance on social media, streaming content, and
open-source data.
The definition
of a library is already changing.
Some
libraries have 3D printers and other cutting-edge tools that makes them
not just places of learning, but creation. "I think the library as a place
of access to materials, physical and virtual, becomes increasingly
important," Pescovitz says. People will come to see libraries as places to
create the future, not just learn about the present.
Pescovitz
offers the example of genetic engineering, carried out through "an
open-source library of genetic parts that can be recombined in various way to
make new organisms that don't exist in nature."
For
instance, people could create their own microbes that are engineered to detect
toxins in the water, he says, similar to how people are already meeting up in
biology-centered hacker spaces.
Several decades
from now, libraries will morph even further.
Pescovitz
speculates that humans will have collected so much data that society will move
into the realm of downloading sensory data. What we experience could be made
available for sharing.
"Right
now the world is becoming instrumented with sensors everywhere - sensors in our
bodies, sensors in our roads, sensors in our mobile phones, sensors in our
buildings - all of which all collecting high-resolution data about the physical
world," he says. "Meanwhile, we're making leaps in understanding how
the brain processes experiences and translates that into what we call
reality."
That
could lead to a "library of experiences."
In
such a library, Pescovitz imagines that you could "check out" the
experience of going to another planet or inhabiting the mind of the family dog.
What
probably won't change that much are librarians and the physical spaces they
watch over. Pescovitz suspects that humans will always need some sort of guide
to make a foreign landscape more familiar. Whether humanity turns that job into
one for artificial intelligence is another matter, he says.
"We
talk a lot about information and the information age, but really what I think
people are looking for is wisdom and knowledge," Pescovitz says.
That
has been true for thousands of years and will continue to be true for thousands
more, no matter how weird the future might get.
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