Knowledge is Becoming An Object
Boxes of Knowledge.
Human knowledge has been growing insanely rapidly (doubling up every year, at this point) and it is expected to double up every 12 hours; some day in future. Human life, on the other hand, is still too short to keep up with the loads of things to know; and our brain physically incapable. Things have changed. Some centuries ago a person with expertise in mathematics, medicine; music; astronomy; law; philosophy; linguistics; languages; religious studies; and athleticism would be considered a true Master. Today we can start learning a small section of a section of a section of a major field and still not be the best at it.
At some point in my life I considered studying Liberal Arts at university. Liberal Arts (as in education) consist of Languages, Linguistics; Mathematics; Religious Studies; Literature; Philosophy; Psychology; Social Sciences; and Arts. Sounds truly perfect, but there was a blackout (not literally) and it lasted for 2 years and one day I found myself studying artificial intelligence at university (absolutely loving it).
There was a shift in my thoughts and studies and suddenly I was reading different books and looking at different aspects of human life and futurism. Knowledge is everything, in this context.
Life is too short to learn everything
As much as I love to think about what AI will bring to our world, when it comes to genetics I wouldn’t want to make any new assumptions. So I’ll just assume typical human will still live around 80–100 years. There is only one consequence for this imbalance (when our knowledge grows but our lifespan doesn’t, that some day in future:
“We’ll need to study 8 years just to learn what happened in only one month”.
Hence the need for intelligent machines capable of handling tacit knowledge. Development of such machines is a milestone human race will definitely reach. Absolutely. One day we won’t need to learn/work as much as we do today (spending decades of our lives doing so) because a machine can do it for us. Don’t forget “We are not our jobs”. Working, studying and many other such things that we have been doing for years are not the natural attributes of a human or states of his life. They’re simply needs. We wouldn’t need to spend a decade learning things if there was a machine that knew everything (and I mean everything) and could use the knowledge at the right place at the right time. In order for that machine to do that, it would need to store everything it knew as Boxes of Knowledge, like what computers do with explicit knowledge (files and documents).
It’s already happening
Knowledge being an object
Every first year university student will soon realize there is a remarkably huge difference between a high school teacher and a university lecturer. At high school, there was almost no question your teacher couldn’t answer (unless you asked an amazingly special question). At university, however, it is possible that a lecturer can’t answer a question on spot. Why? It’s really simple. They have spent at least a decade studying and doing in-depth research on many different fields of their major field (imagine each sub-field as a box). So they already possess these boxes of knowledge, say mathematics, programming, different algorithms, image processing, robotic, machine learning, neural networks etc. Each box contains many smaller boxes. The lecturer is good at many things, it doesn’t mean they can access every box instantly. They need time to refer to the older boxes. Their brain, like an object oriented programming language, in order to come up with the correct answer; needs to import content from a certain box of knowledge; simply because there are a lot of these boxes in the lecturer’s head.
A high school teacher is focused on one field, very limited. Even if today a lecturer can answer every question related to various different fields that he’s studied, 20 years from now it would be physically impossible (for brain). We’re gonna know a lot. Good thing machines will be there for us, that day.
No matter how hard we try to draw the border between tacit and explicit knowledge, one day we will need to present tacit knowledge to machine in an organized form (just like explicit knowledge): Boxes, I like to imagine.
We are going to be there one day, for sure. Future, as I see it, is when we don’t need to know things. This will change our lives in many ways, I explained one before.
Artificial Intelligence might help us Unknow things
I am so confident my Boxes of Knowledge theory is in order. What I’m about to say next, however, is just food for thought. It may or may not come true.
I speak Persian and many [non-Iranian] people tell me how beautiful Persian sounds to them. There was this video that went viral a couple of years ago in which an American student says he knows 23 languages and Persian is his favorite.
I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to hear Persian, when you don’t actually know Persian! Can you see the problem? Languages sound different to when you can vs can’t speak them. I love Persian but I’d always wondered how it feels to hear my language from a non-Persian speaker’s point of…hearing!
The problem might sound ridiculous, doesn’t matter; the way we could possibly solve it, does. Just like writing a simple program. Try to break down the problem to smaller parts and create the appropriate algorithm. In this case, if I wanna hear my language from a non-myLanguage-speaker’s point of hearing; first I need to Unknow my language. I believe Boxes of Knowledge might give us the chance to do it. They just might. Because if in future we don’t have to learn things (read: if we’re dependent on a machine’s knowledge) we will be importing boxes of knowledge from a machine and use it where/when necessary. Since a language is knowledge too, it means we might be able to import a box (language), use it and put it back where it was! As if we never actually had it in our brain.
What a time to be alive, anyway.
