Robotic Nation Evidence

First of all, one would hope that we will eliminate most libraries over the next 30 years as we completely replace paper books with electronic ones. But for those few libraries that remain, we can replace the librarians with robts:

Robots get bookish in libraries

From the article:

The prototype has cameras, sensors and grippers so it can locate and collect a book. The hope is that one day teams of service robots could work in libraries.

The main issue with deploying service robots outside of the factory to work in domains surrounded by people has been one of safety, explained Professor Angel del Pobil.

Mixing robots and humans in an unstructured, uncontrolled environment, where there all manner of obstacles to negotiate, could have unpredictable results.

Professor Pobil thinks libraries are the best place to start introducing robots into public spaces, or at least to start showing that the technology is possible and works.

According to this page, there are about 167,000 librarians in the U.S.