Information Shock

Unlike the Library of Alexandria, our texts won't turn to dust—they are perfectly preserved on silicon chips. The modern dark age isn't defined by the destruction of knowledge, but by our total apathy and fading ability to engage with it. Using AI in exchanges will most like exacerbate this problem.

A neuroscientists (and former Google employee) talks about what we may lose from the Information Shock.

Olof Sundin's CoLIS 2025 paper reaches nearby ground from a different angle, arguing that AI is rendering sources progressively invisible and forcing LIS to rethink search, sources, and evaluation. A useful companion to the Information Shock argument, running on the source-visibility axis rather than the mediating-unit one.

A different take on AI literacy. Unlike the Information Shock approach that sees exchanges not operating in a literacy frame, this article embraces (and expands) AI literacy.

How some universities respond to AI

How AI conversants are more than just responders like search - they actively delude in interchanges making AI literacy problematic.

A multidisciplinary white paper from the Schwartz Reisman Institute that surveys nine fields' accounts of trust in AI and lands on trust as the defining problem for responsible deployment, arriving at the same destination as the shock argument from the opposite direction: by integrating existing frameworks rather than by identifying what has ruptured beneath them.

An extensive discussion of Conversation Theory and conversants in the context of librarianship

Extensive discussion of the Knowledge Infrastructure.

Preprint with the most complete presentation of Information Shock and the Generative AI induced shock.

Showing that AI answers are already changing search patterns.