Libraries, AI, and the Age of Consequences
图书馆、人工智能与后果时代
Michael Peter Edson�https://usingdata.com
World Library Forum and Information Technology in Education 2026
Peking University, May 2026
Image: Dreamspace Liverpool, Andy Miah, CC-BY-SA https://flic.kr/p/gvf8o
Reference slides and context at https://www.usingdata.com/usingdata/2026/5/24/libraries-ai-and-the-age-of-consequences-
At the opening of the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, I approached a middle-aged guest.
“How are you enjoying the evening?” I asked.
“I am angry,” he told me.
“This museum is a jewel — but where were you when I was a child? Where are you now, in the hundreds of other cities where a museum like this is needed?”
“Where were you when I was a child?”
Photo: Museum of Solutions
…Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some [less radical] aims?
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling.
“What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that,
We had no answer.
Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.
– The Earth Is in a Death Spiral. It Will Take Radical Action to Save Us, �by George Monbiot, 2018
what is it you want me to feel?”
Why do we feel this way?
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
We are living in the middle of a new kind of revolution, not yet usefully described in the public sphere, that is driving a wedge between citizens (adults), 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, that concern themselves with “culture”, memory, knowledge, and truth.
后果的时代 1. The Age of Consequences
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The new revolution consists of a “phase change” in values, knowing, and power: schisms in what we prize as "good" (values), our ability to agree on what is "true" (knowing), and who has agency and voice (power). This creates a derangement in civics, democracy, and everyday life.
三大断裂 2. The Three Great Ruptures
公理性断裂
认识论断裂
制度性断裂
Axiological Rupture
Epistemological Rupture
Institutional Rupture
公理性断裂 价值观与道德 Axiological Revolution (values, morals)
“Gut feeling, Joe Rogan, and echo-chamber reshares on Twitter(x)”*
"We've had a play-based childhood for literally 200 million years because we're mammals... It faded away and was replaced, very suddenly, by the phone-based childhood... And that is not a human childhood. It is not a suitable way to grow up."
Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation
* Reddit r/progressiveHQ on Fox News’ methodology (Jan 3, 2026)
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Epistemological
认识论断裂 知识与真理的演变Epistemological Rupture (knowledge, truth)
“We are facing the rise of a new kind of actor in history—a non-organic mind.�The collapse of the human monopoly on meaning-making is the most important transformation of our era.”
Yuval Harari, Nexus, 2025
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
“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.”
�
U.N. Under Secretary Michael Møller
U.N. museum workshop
Copenhagen, March, 2015
制度性断裂 权力Institutional Rupture (culture and authority)
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
驱动因素 3. Drivers
More than politics or “change”
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
These ruptures are more than mere politics and norms: they arise from a violent confluence: a “phase change” in our relationship to the biosphere, the social sphere, and technology. The nature of this confluence is shocking, unprecedented, and total (global and all encompassing). It creates an “age of consequences” — a physical and systemic reckoning in which the presumption of a stable, predictable world is gone.
驱动因素 3. Drivers
生物圈 The Biosphere
技术圈 The Technosphere
社会圈 The Sociosphere
Biosphere — planetary systems
Technosphere — scientific, technical
Sociosphere — institutions, social relations, culture
Sociosphere�institutions, social relations, culture
Technosphere
Scientific (physics), technical
Biosphere�Planetary systems;�the science of life
Cultural Revolution
Axiological
Epistemological
Institutional
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Hostile and Unfamiliar “Eaarth”
“We imagine that we live on a planet like the one our parents lived on, or our grandparents... But we don't. We live on a different planet…
For the last ten thousand years, the Holocene, the earth has been a remarkably stable place... Civilization is a mechanism for harvesting that stability.
We were built for the old earth. We built our cities and our agriculture and our laws and our habits on the expectation of a certain kind of stability, a certain range of temperature and rainfall. That range is gone.”
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Hostile and Unfamiliar “Eaarth”
Destruction of Biodiversity
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Ocean Acidification
CO₂ + H₂O + CO₃²⁻ → 2HCO₃⁻
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Sea Level Rise
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Xu et al. (2020) PNAS 117: 11350-11355
The uninhabitable Earth
Dark tropical areas represent 3 billion displaced people by 2070.
Where will 3 billion displaced people go?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/trump-ai-elementary.html
“...58% of students would not be able to [a novel] on their own”
Artificial Intelligence
“[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? 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?”
Andrew Postman, 2005, Introduction to 20th anniversary edition of�Neil Postman’s iconic Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Artificial Intelligence
Reference List: AI drives a wedge between librarian, citizen, and democracy
AI is already encroaching on the “Jeffersonian/Franklinian” purpose of librarianship through,
Mastery of the 4 fundamental forces (physics)
“For the first time in human history, we have decoded�the four fundamental forces of nature—gravity, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces—which drive the entire universe. Each time one of them was understood and described, it changed human history.
We are now at a turning point in history. The era of discovery in physics is coming to a close, and the era of mastery is beginning. This century will be the time in which we learn to exploit these forces to their ultimate potential.”
Physics Revolution (4 forces)
Michio Kaku�The Physics of the Future
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Synthetic Biology - New trees of life
Dr. George Church writes of a “biologically unconstrained” future.
“We are no longer limited to what nature has provided. We can now begin to write the code for organisms that have no ancestors.”
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will�Reinvent Nature and Ourselves�George Church & Ed Regis
The cost of sequencing a genome has gone from $100,000,000 in 2000 to <$100 in 2024: a 1-million x increase in efficiency.
“The ability to read and write DNA is increasing at a rate that outpaces our ability to understand the implications. We are moving from a world of 'discovery' to a world of 'design' at a speed that is historically unprecedented.”
Robert H. Carlson, Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life
Genetic Engineering “outpaces our ability to understand”
This slide of Islamorada, Florida represents a story about citizens being ill-equipped to make decisions about genetically engineered life. Reference Amy Webb’s Genesis Machine.
This is happening now
Mail order “bio-foundries” synthesize made-to-order DNA. Type the sequence you want into a web form and receive the DNA via Fedex in a few days.
CRISPR (Nobel prize winners Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier) can precision edit DNA. We can now create custom DNA machines that live inside your body to target specific functions/disease.
mRNA (Nobel prize winners Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman) creates programmable biological code. It can turn the body into a temporary factory for manufacturing new drugs.
Extended human life — Imagine the possibility of politicians who hold office until they are 150 years old. Imagine Donald Trump’s 20th term as President or “Senator Ted Cruz’s 70th term in congress” (via Genesis Machine).
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Isn’t this just like other periods of change?
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Speed, acceleration, exponential change, delayed effects tipping points
This epoch of change challenges democracy
“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.”
Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Photo: CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
What does this mean for young people?
“As a society, we are failing this generation of young people”
Senior decision-maker at a European National Museum�AI and Youth visioning workshop. Copenhagen, 2024
We are failing this generation of young people.
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
“Teens are put on this earth to question the decisions that people in
power make. That is the superpower of adolescence. But for this latest generation, there is the sense that time is running out. Adults fall short, but now their foibles have world-altering consequences.”
Mattie Kahn, Young and Restless, The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions (2024)
Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech, and the absent child
“In the rooms where the most foundational decisions about our future are made, the child is not present. The needs of a developing mind, the right to privacy, and the importance of a slow, non-optimized childhood are missing from the code, because the architects are optimized for a world that has no room for the ‘unproductive’ vulnerability of youth.”
Karen Hao
The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Institutions — In this deranged moment, institutions, which is to say our intermediaries of culture and power (such as the “cultural sector”, broadly defined), must be our allies in natality, building our capacity to create new worlds through actions and speech. But institutions are responding too slowly — oblivious to the circumstances of the moment. This leaves us stranded between the world that has passed and the one that will, by necessity, be born.
文化与权力的中介
成为“新元”的盟友
从“守望”向“创造”的转型
Intermediaries of Culture & Power
Allies in Natality
A Transformation from Watching to Creating
机构与使命 4. Institutions
大动荡 Derangement – Amitav Ghosh
Photo: Modified from https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/amitav-ghosh-its-a-fools-errand-to-imagine-the-future
Derangement – our intellectual tools (including literature, culture) cannot contain the “unthinkable” scale of the climate crisis.
The Paris Agreement is deranged because it uses the language of bureaucracy and technology to avoid facing sacrifice, accountability…
Uncanny – Nature is no longer a passive, stable backdrop for human stories; it is an active, unpredictable protagonist that is “looking back at us”
Future generations will hold artists and writers as culpable as politicians because "the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats"
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
Civic engagement model derived from Ethan Zuckerman, MIT
This drawing by Michael Peter Edson, 2021
Stuck Here
The “Zuckerman Quadrant”
Civic engagement model derived from Ethan Zuckerman, MIT
This drawing by Michael Peter Edson, 2021
薄层参与：暂时的、浅层次的关注
深层参与：专注的、长期的、小众协作的努力
象征性结果：�旨在传递信息或形象
起步尚可，但多数机构往往止步于此, 安于现状。
现状陷阱
官僚主义的泥潭
闪现的火花
公共显现之地
“Zuckerman Quadrant”
Add features, programs, support and infrastructure, to achieve a substantive impact
通过增加功能、项目 �支持与基础设施, �实现实质性的�影响力转型。
践行
新生性与全球街道 5. Natality and The Global Street
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
The Global Street — This drama of revolution, rupture, derangement, and rebirth is now playing out on the “global street “of global cities. The future will be won or lost here, where “culture” helps to constitute, or fails to constitute, our right to stand together as authors of a better world.
新生性是创造新开端的动力。 Natality is the force of new beginnings
全球街道是发声与行动的基石。 The global Street is the foundation of voice and action
Saskia Sassen
Photo: modified from https://blog.ted.com/can-a-city-be-too-technological-saskia-sassen-at-ted2013/
“城市是普通人共同创造未来的空间。”
摆脱“驱逐”，夺回“存在感”
将“非场所”转化为“行动之地”
The city is a space where ordinary people together make the future.
Moving from "Expulsion" to reclaiming "Presence"
Transforming "Non-Places" into sites of Action
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
全球街道：共建未来的空间
The Global Street: A Space to Make the Future
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Natality — the act/capacity for new beginnings in the world
- Adults must “decide if they love the world enough to take responsibility for it.”
- Requires “places of appearance”, the foundation of all political life, where our voices and actions can make the world anew.
超越“存放”，迈向“显现”
言说与行动的舞台
创造新事物的空间
Moving beyond "Storage" toward "Appearance"
The stage for Speech and Action
The space for starting something new
Photo: https:://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingadata.com
公共显现之地The Place of Appearance
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same [measure] save it from that ruin which — except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young — would be inevitable.” �
— Hannah Arendt�The Crisis in Education in Between Past and Future (1954)�
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“The way of social evolution lies in securing order, on the one hand, and in the promotion of progress, on the other…
The history of humanity is the history of the youth's struggle to create a new life.”
— Li Dazhao, "Spring" (1916)�Head of Peking University Library
社会进化之理，一方面在受秩序之维系，一方面在受进步之促动…
人类之历史，即少年英雄之创造史。
李大钊，《青春》（1916年）�北京大学图书馆馆长
The Library as a Place of Appearance
在后果的时代，图书馆必须成为显现之地： �作为一切公共生活之前提， �旨在通过学习、言说与行动，践行人类的‘诞生性’。
In the Age of Consequences, the library must be a Place of Appearance: the prerequisite for all public life, designed to actualize our human Natality through learning, speech, and action.
Donella Meadows
“There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Photo: Modified from https://www.systemsthinkingmarin.org/resources/donella-meadows/
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Rolf Happel
“Communities need help to take action. If you just sit back and wait for a movement to take off you will wait forever.”
At Digital Culture and the Transformation of Europe, 2022
Via https://www.usingdata.com/climate/2022/3/1/notes-from-digital-culture-and-the-transformation-of-europe slide 66
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What does this look like in practice?
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Towards a Global Resilient Information Network
February 2026
In a complex world, we stand for shared digital stewardship of assets of culture and knowledge across time and space.
Access to culture and knowledge is a cornerstone of democracy and human rights. For generations, libraries, archives, museums, and related institutions have acted as stewards of this shared inheritance. Today, that institutional responsibility is under increasing strain.
We live in a period of profound instability. Armed conflict, geopolitical fragmentation, and the strategic use of disinformation erode trust at societal scale. Climate change disrupts the environmental and institutional conditions on which preservation depends. At the same time, the digital domain - on which so much of contemporary culture and knowledge now rests - has become a concentrated site of risk.
Digital systems enable unprecedented access and participation, and introduce new vulnerabilities. Cyberattacks have undermined institutional credibility and taken collections of global importance offline. Platform dependence and vendor lock-in increasingly shape what can be preserved and how. Rapid technological change renders organisations outdated at speed, while algorithmic systems steer attention according to the values and interests of economic actors. At the same time, economic concentration and (geo)political pressure challenge digital sovereignty and trust.
In this environment, cultural loss is accelerating: data disappears, metadata is severed from context, access collapses even when bits survive, and algorithms increasingly determine what is visible, valued, or forgotten. ...
23 AI Things – A new global initiative from IFLA�Empowering Library Professionals�for the Era of AI
Maker Faire
Maker Faire copenhagen: https://makerfaire.com/
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Irish Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss
https://cyp-biodiversity.ie/resources/ | https://open.substack.com/pub/demnext/p/children-and-young-peoples-assemblies
“…Children are excluded from electoral democracy by default. Deliberative processes offer a legitimate, rights-based alternative that gives them a real say in decisions that affect their lives.”� – DemocracyNext
Storyhouse & Young Storyhouse, Chester, England
Southbank Centre
Human Library
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Museum of Solutions (MuSo)
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Photo: Museum of Solutions
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
SDGs
SDGs
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
Leverage the SDGs. They aren’t always perfect for people-to-people communication (they need a lot of tailoring to local realities, and a lot of programming to bring them to life) but they have extraordinary global convening power and they’re great for bringing together diverse groups in civil society, gov, business, education…
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Library of Solutions (LiSo)
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“MuSo is revolutionary […] MuSo has a strong belief in the power of children and that children are the changemakers.
The young visitors are encouraged and empowered to think for themselves and to find methods and solutions, looking to the future, to make a better world for their communities.
In the long run, MuSo contributes to raising responsible members of society. Who else but a children’s museum can carry out this educational task in such a holistic way?”
Hands On! award jury statement, 2024
Bigger N
Creating a dramatically bigger ‘N’ of awareness and effort
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Bringing places of appearance to scale
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
One MuSo in Mumbai is a miracle, but with places like MuSo/LiSo in Beijing, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Paris, London, your neighborhood…we might help young people to make a consequential impact on the world.
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
What if…?
© Michael Peter Edson, info@libraryofsolutions.org, https://www.usingdata.com/library-of-solutions
Start with 3 cities in 3 countries
A library concept
A variety of 4-story commercial structures (new development; neighborhood; city center)
Finance via urban/neighborhood development, school group and café revenue, rent/grants for social startups
Rotating programming (morning adults, midday schools, after school programs, evening adults)
Youth governance
Anyone, anywhere can create their own “branch” (school, bedroom, apartment building, hospital, library…)
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“The future is not a place we are going to, but one we are creating.�The paths are not to be found, but made.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Being young is a great advantage, since we see the world from a�new perspective and we are not afraid to make radical changes.”
– Greta Thunberg
Photo: Museum of Solutions
“Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for everyone.”
Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia�Via What would the ultimate child-friendly city look like? by Laura Laker.�The Guardian, February 28, 2018. HT Imandeep Kaur.
“If you can build it in Mumbai you can build it anywhere”
Photographer unknown
Wisdom from the street
Thank you!
CC-BY Michael Peter Edson usingdata.com
Michael Peter Edson�https://usingdata.com
Reference slides and context at https://www.usingdata.com/usingdata/2026/5/24/libraries-ai-and-the-age-of-consequences-