Libraries 2045: What Will the Next 20 Years of Libraries and AI Look Like?

Libraries and technology have always coevolved

Posted on March 16, 2026 in Blog Posts

Editor’s note: The American Library Association is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2026. Its slogan, “For Our Libraries. For 150 Years More,” presents an opportunity to reflect and speculate on the transformation of libraries. We were particularly interested in considering the coevolution of libraries with technology, and to that end, we invited Kyle Bylin, a librarian at Saginaw Valley State University, to offer a tour of the past and future of libraries. Learn more about ALA150.

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A Timeline for What’s Next

In November 2025, I started using the vibe-coding platform Lovable, which had recently exploded in popularity, acquiring over 8 million users as of late 2025. For those who might be unfamiliar, “vibe-coding” is when you speak your native language into a chatbot; on the other side, an agent converts what you said into computer code. AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined this phrase about a year ago and now says “agentic engineering” is the new term that people should use to describe the larger implications of this software revolution. Scott Meyer of Chipp.AI defines this new phrase as “engineering systems of agents that work while we sleep.”  

I’ve also seen AI influencers on TikTok refer to vibe-coding as “addicting.” My own personal experience agrees. My activity on Lovable was captured in a year-end report (similar to the one seen in Spotify’s Wrapped feature) that said that I’d written over 1,400 messages and nearly 1 million lines of code, which resulted redesigning and launching a dozen websites and apps in a few short months. One day, I started designing a LibGuide called Music2045.com, which featured a timeline of the major tech disruptions that impacted the music business as well as the best books on the subject.

Eventually, I showed this website to my fellow colleagues at the library, because I thought it was a pretty cool creation. At one point, my director asked if I’d be willing or be interested in creating one that showcased the history of libraries. Later that week, inspiration struck, and I created a website called Libraries2045.com, where I tried to showcase important events in the history of libraries and future of AI in one unique timeline. Telling you how nerdy this website is would put most people to sleep, but it’s deeply researched, mostly uncited, and strictly fascinating. It’s designed to be a prototype and conversation starter rather than some kind of final say on the matter.

The website aims to connect ancient libraries to the print revolution, to public libraries, to the digital era, and finally to the intelligence age. It recognizes that, in this timeline, the American Library Association this year is celebrating its 150th anniversary. This is an organization that went from 103 librarians in 1876 to 57,000 members today.

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From 10 Blue Links to Thinking Machines

What I tried to do with Libraries 2045 is give us all something to talk about when it comes to the current state of frontier AI and where it’s going. Inevitably, the futures of academic libraries and AI are intertwined, because AI is a general-purpose technology that affects all aspects of industry and sector, including higher education and academic research libraries. As we progress from 2026 to 2035, it’s inevitable that the developments in AI are going to have a profound impact on how people find information online and how information is understood, contextualized, and constructed. There are also going to be questions that get asked along the way about what happens if some science fiction turns true and today’s chatbots do gain superintelligence, which we would recognize as exceptional, well cited, and unbelievably smart.

AI isn’t the first digital disruption to impact libraries directly. Looking back, it’s worth noting that the internet, search engines, and open access have played a huge role in reshaping how humanity finds and shares knowledge. The internet began the process of challenging publishers to make everything available online rather than bound in physical journals. The idea that knowledge could be at your fingertips in front of you, displayed on a computer screen, challenged libraries at their core and forced further evolution of services. Rather than the information being physically stored inside the library, it now rested digitally on a server somewhere out there. The university and library system raced, for a moment, to provide everyone with access to computers and databases. And the introduction of search engines further challenged the supremacy of the library, because one small box promised to be the gateway to the world’s information. Why go to the library if everything exists online, or in the case of the smartphone, sits in your pocket and inside apps? These shifts started small at first, but as they gained momentum, they asked bigger questions that in many ways still echo today.

The dawn of the intelligence age is posing even bigger and provocative questions, because the nature of how people search for and get information is changing again. Chatbot answers are personalized to you, based on your previous conversations and what the chatbot knows about you. Rather than being a mere list of information—the famous 10 blue links in Google—chatbots are now expert researchers that can go out on the web for a half-hour and conduct deep research into any topic. The web browser, rather than just being the thing that delivers you the Google home page, is also now being reimagined to have generative AI at every single part of the user interaction. “AI Mode” lingers in the corner of every Google product. This change will further reshape the nature of information and how people find it. These days, the chatbot is almost playing the role of the “librarian” itself, as it can help you find sources and show how to cite them. The books that still exist on the library shelves are slowly looking as if they’re collecting dust compared to the supreme advantages of frontier AI models that can string together a sentence faster than you can pull a book off the shelf.

For the foreseeable future, society is racing at bottleneck speed toward the event horizon of the technological singularity, which is when inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted humans will merge with AI in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near and his follow-up book The Singularity Is Nearer in 2024. His books represent a potential forecast for where GenAI is today and where the pioneers of this field think it could be in the next 20 years. At the speed that things are progressing now, who’s to say that some of general intelligence doesn’t start to show between 2029 and 2032 and then again between 2035 and 2045? Maybe it’s already here, but it’s still a subject of heated and contentious debate. It is anyone’s best guess for how quickly things start moving from there, based on all the improvements from all the past years of frontier AI.

Through all this tumultuous change, libraries have proven to be highly resilient and adaptable. In The Library: A Fragile History, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen point out “the uncomfortable truth” of libraries throughout the ages: “No society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations.” Thus, we can likely anticipate that this generation of millennials and the “AI natives” that come after will continue to transform the library in their image rather than maintain that of the previous generations.

Is Something Big Happening?

The first time my library’s director saw LibGuides at an academic library conference, they said that they were absolutely thrilled because LibGuides made it so that libraries were no longer dependent on the university’s website development/IT team to put things on the internet for faculty and students. I feel the same way about seeing what vibe-coding makes possible when it comes to the future of the LibGuide and where it’s going, but also for the future of libraries and librarians and what more powerful AI could mean for our field.

In this year of anniversary, it’s important to think about where the field is today, where it’s going tomorrow, and how we can best prepare our patrons for the version of the future that we see unfolding. For ourselves as librarians, it’s important to think about what parts of our daily activities need to be updated in the next five years and what that looks like from an academic perspective. How quickly can the curriculum stay current with the AI frontier—and what does it mean for preparing students for roles at leading AI labs and companies? Those are questions that administrators and professors must be asking themselves right now. My alma mater, the University of Michigan School of Information, has introduced a human-centered generative AI minor. I think that is certainly one step in the right direction.

As I look to the future of what automation and agents GenAI might bring to the library field, it has me reflecting on the recent past—a small drop in the bucket compared to the larger timeline, but still full of major changes to the profession. Within the past 10 years, the reference desk has gone from a centerpiece of the library to a ghost town where students no longer seek help. This is because COVID-19 forever changed people’s behaviors and comfort levels with in-person interaction. It is also because the following generation also had that same experience. Reference has become a chat and email service rather than a service that once had students waiting in a line. In the past 20 years, we also saw the rise and fall of the student computer lab, the change of web searching behavior, and an explosion of information online.

The biggest challenge of the current moment is that GenAI progress can feel like an electrical current when you start seeing the potential of what’s possible.

But if you’re not constantly trying to push the limits of what’s possible, then you may think that today’s GenAI model is like last year’s overhyped one. And in sectors like video, leaps and bounds are being made every 3–4 months. In a few short years, we’ve gone from testing if the actor Will Smith can eat spaghetti (this is a real test, YouTube it) to seeing action heroes Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting like one of them will be the last man standing. Models that used to be text generators are now able to reason and orchestrate agents, allowing computer programmers to produce way more code with less time, managing multiple projects and agentic engineering outputs, more akin to a software manager role than coder. A task like developing a website or app can now be effectively handled with a single prompt, and the agents that run these coding systems can now reliably work behind the scenes for several hours on end without human input.

 The most important thing that I’ve always tried to do with my reporting is to start the discussion about how advances in frontier AI will impact libraries and what it might mean for the library profession. I’ve also tried to offer glimpses into the future and what it might mean to take these emerging technologies and teach these next-generation literacies. To me, it’s already clear that something powerful is happening. As one AI CEO tried to capture in a viral blog post, “Something big is happening.” I agree.

While the frontier AI timelines and progress are going slower than some people anticipated last year, there have still been huge gains in capabilities as demonstrated by my ability to vibe-code the Libraries2045.com website during a couple of workdays. It hints to a world (or potential class) where perhaps students would learn how to create their own software and applications as a part of an AI studio program at the library’s imagination lab.

Lastly, I’d like to remind you that my website isn’t trying to be an oracle. However, AI is now reportedly “scary good” at predicting the future. So, take the website with both a grain of salt and take the predictions about disruption seriously.

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