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ScholarPermalink Reply by Siddhartha Shankar Ray on December 19, 2015 at 22:01

Dear Sri Raghabendra K.R.,

Thanks for your post addressing a very important issue for the future.

It is to be seen how the young generation reacts to this potential "threat"!!

To me, it seems to be similar to the time when machines were introduced to replace manual labour. When Computers were to be introduced, many staff unions opposed as they led the people to believe that many people will be jobless. Time has proved how wrong they were; however, there is no denying that people without Computer knowledge can not sustain; neither in professional life nor in personal/social life. But computer as a medium, was no threat, rather a blessing for many.

Similarly, Google's activities are also human driven and thus human dependent. As I personally believe, human brain and ability surpasses such machines on miles. People like researchers and academicians need information for their "purpose"  which means tailor-made Information. I think, it is this point where human ability surpass machine intelligence. human brains can be wise and this ability can easily surpass any "filtering" process of any machine driven intelligent systems. A few days ago a similar thing happened at our place. A supplier delivered some 5000+ books for our Library. Now, as I was doing preliminary cataloguing of the books, I observed that several of the books are not relevant for us.

As a test check up, I have selected some keywords and tried them over Computer for elimination. The end result was that 53% to 62% were correct for computers but when checked manually, the result was over 98% (I have counted the number of books discarded  by Computer vis a vis number of books discarded manually against the total number of books) Here the nearly 35%+ was quite important which the human ability could detect.

I admit that my trial was very crude and had the elimination process by Computer been made much more sophisticated it could certainly yield better result.

Still, on the basis of this trial, I feel that we, the library people are safe albeit for the time being.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray

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