You may (or may not) have heard- this week the game show Jeopardy! will be pitting humans versus computer. IBM has developed an extremely advanced machine named Watson that will be competing against two of the best Jeopardy! players of all time: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
Certainly, this technology is not anywhere near the consumer level ... yet. We have seen this style of Q&A tech skyrocket on customer service telephone calls. In the future, whether 5 years or 10 years away, can this advancement eventually replace common reference in libraries and archives?
Of course, there's a good side and a bad side to everything. It's a little scary to think of humans losing jobs to computers, especially in a field so heavily saturated with fresh MLIS-grads looking for just about anything. Also, how will knowledge management be treated if in-house knowledge begins to accrue within hard drives and discs rather than brains?
Being a tech-addict, I can't forget the positive aspect of implementing this into an archives. The benefit of freeing up valuable human time would be immense. How much of your day-to-day is filled with answering basic reference questions that you (probably) have answered 10 times earlier this year? This leaves time that can be spent on preservation and conservation, tackling those projects you've always wished you could do, and digging out that backlog.
Regardless of which side of the coin you fall, tune in this week to watch Watson take on the humans!
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