Chipping Away at the Great Iceberg of Human Knowledge
Do we need AI to ‘pick the brain’ of our civilization?
With Miroslaw Manicki
We hear that artificial intelligence (AI) is really good at rummaging through information on the Internet and making use of it. First of all, there is an assumption that valid knowledge is available in online forms. This is surely news to the scientists and practitioners and shopkeepers and housekeepers of the world who walk around with knowledge in their heads that has never worked its way online.
Lets assume the AI people are right, the knowledge is there in the big ‘ice sheet’ but it is unused. Civilization is a nice thing from this perspective, but it is not sufficient to make use of the very knowledge and experience that it creates.
At that point, we could well thank AI proponents for pointing out our conundrum, which surely will create spiralling downward conditions. If we cannot in the collective learn from our successes as well as our mistakes, we are surely doomed — particularly as our outreach, sheer mass, and scope accelerate. We should then take steps to fix our problem, reaffirming our capacities as cultures and societies.
AI proponents otherwise insist that the easier path would be to turn the issue over to computers. Machines could dig into the ‘snow’, perhaps we could say the ‘cheese’, of the knowledge and make sense of it for us. It is unclear, but the AI proponents imply that humans could then kind of kick back and relax and enjoy piña coladas while the machines solve all vexing problems for all of us.
Sounds nice, particularly if we have given up on thinking on our own. It seems outlandish and unnatural for humans to agree to become so passive. There is the problem of weird results from AI tools as reported recently, as there is an unslaught of ‘AI chat bots’ that are variously reported as effective OR NOT.
So, the ‘iceberg’, or the ‘ice sheet’, how do we make sense of it?
The first question is as to context, how to recognize it and how to recreate it. To do this, you had better be collecting a lot of data — not bits and pieces, but streams. Don’t think that nature will let you be selective. You don’t have that choice. You need to be able to take it all in.
You might hear from IT specialists across the table that this cannot be done.
You must be selective. You must set up complex data models, tables after tables after tables. Then you have to throw away all of the “secondary” factors and concentrate on only a few [Typical peremptory requirement of IT specialists, even to experts and authorities].
In the process, we have observed a certain smug satisfaction on the part of the technologists in question, who can thus lecture to experts and authorities in their own areas of knowledge and expertise. The point is, the programmers get the last word in such interactions, regardless of what the subject matter experts think.
What they say is probably true as to the impossibility of the task on their watch. Nature is not to be bullied in this manner. Using the prevalent methods and tools of contemporary technologists, the job of accurately modeling and mimicking natural processes is probably unrealizable.
That may be why they say that machines are needed to get us out of our jam. We would say that they need AI to get them out of their jam. This demonstrates all of the characteristics of a ‘hail Mary’ act, a means of drawing attention away from IT shortcomings and diversions. It is not for nothing that a part of their AI public relation blitz makes use of the now-famous ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’ that has characterized Silicon Valley marketing from the 1980s onward.
There was an older, saner time in the world of technology. In the late 1960s and 1970s, may ideas rose that were subsequently jettisoned to establish ‘command and control’ of process via technology. They used some of the ‘good stuff’ in technology, like UNIX/Linux and relational databases, but only for their purposes. There was a multimedia blitz at the turn of the century that turbocharged the effort at disempowering non-technologists and asserting prerogatives of their own as graphical interfaces were introduced and many fine features of systems, particularly in enterprises, were phased out.
Based on this, social media systems were introduced for ‘free’ that allowed systems providers to clear the table in many markets — most particularly in advertising and sale of digital products. What was the civilizational effect of this? This has been mixed at best. There was clearly a hollowing out of small and localized businesses. There have been ways for small businesspeople to claw their way back in by filling some of the awkward cracks in online offerings — such as with Amazon, Alibaba, and other mega sites.
The digital problem is principally on the supply side. How can we deliver substantive answers — processes — to the people when and how they need it in ways that they can understand and act on?
That is a question that deserves our primary attention.