I don’t think so.
A form of this question came up around the mid 1990’s, when some wondered whether the emergence and growing public availability of this new Internet thing would do this, making libraries and librarians obsolete, in effect replacing them with a computer search tool in one’s own home.
It didn’t happen. What actually DID happen back then was that library use at practically all levels INCREASED substantially, following Internet growth, rather than declined, as the Internet grew in use and popularity.
It seems that the existence of this powerful new information retrieval tool, the Internet, FIRED UP the thirst for knowledge, and people, now primed by the new web, realized that libraries were also there for this purpose, and people began to take advantage of that and flocked to the libraries in greater numbers than ever before.
What is more likely to happen now is that libraries and librarians will continue to exist, but the questions now to be put to them by library patrons (“patrons” = library jargon for library users) will become more complicated and sophisticated, as the easier ones will already have been answered by the patrons themselves, using answerbots on their own home computers.
Kind of similar to what happened in many police departments, when Police Service Technicians took over many of the less serious aspects of police work (such as: non‑hazardous, support, administrative duties), freeing up regular police officers to handle the more serious aspects of police work (such as: patrol, arrest, investigation, and emergency duties).
In fact we are already seeing this change occurring in libraries at all levels, with librarians at reference desks receiving more complex and challenging questions from patrons than before.
So will there ever come a time when the answerbots get so good that they really will eliminate the need for all human information sources, such as librarians or similar information professionals?
I don’t think so.
For example, haven’t we all been on the phone talking unsatisfactorily to a robot, until we get the message: “For further assIstance, please press 1 to speak to a company representative” (company representative = a real person).
And then we started getting somewhere!
So the answerbots haven’t replaced us real folks just yet!