We live in times in which the amount of information production is gigantic.
In particular, this has accelerated since the age of computers. Copying, editing and pasting text has become very easy. And now we are on the brink of a flood of machine generated text that resembles natural language.
I myself come from the age just before: during my school years we started to create reports on our computers, used the internet for information gathering and later distributing texts. During my university years, I learned programming and building scripts to generate models and graphs. In my early professional career, I also self-learned the basics of Natural Language Processing, the analysis and generation of natural language with computer code.
The amazing incomprehensible amount of text on the internet has a consequence: the typical value of a single paragraph decreases.
Being interested in development and learning, a good part of my own skill development has been to reflect own my own toolbox. This is fun but sometimes limiting the actual production, because I must admit to possess a bit of neophilia: it is often cool to try new tools, to develop better scripts, to learn templating and abstracting. So it becomes a bit of meta-skill, or meta-meta-skill.
Reflecting on the current developments in the global information ocean, I would like to share an observation.
When AI becomes so good in text production (which it already does, early 2023), the value density naturally decreases.
In the fusion community, I have spent a professional period of preparing policy for knowledge management. In this, part of the problem is the huge amount of information in which important lessons shall be distilled. The relevant information for a single fusion experiment has already since long passed the filter and absorption capacity of a single human brain.
This means that we need to develop new attitudes and approaches to information, and in particular written text.
There are so many long reports, articles, books, comments.
One risk is that the mutual understanding of terminology and reasoning fades away. With the amount of information grows the amount of interpretations, even in written form. An interesting perspective on this possible development in this era is written here: Life after Language (Ribbonfarm).
As the article neatly hints to, this may even result in a new Babylonian Tower. And this can be a huge problem for society. When we understand each other worse, we will be less capable of cooperating and organising and we will be more prone to influence and manipulation from the system at large. This reduces our freedom and autonomy.
So what are we going to do about this? How to deal with this risk?
Awareness of the phenomenon: web content, UX and social media interactions are not what they were: increasingly generated and optimised competing for your attention and emotional attachment. It is vital to develop collective skills, in all age groups and in particular the younger members of society as they grow up with a blanco attitude towards text.
Agreement on the meaning of single terms: definition of individual concepts will be increasingly important. That is, in times where the amount of information was lower, the capacity within a local network (of people, experts, domain workers) to read a larger portion of the information around a topic was larger. So, definitions, analyses, interpretations and further ideation could be mixed without the risk of missing the essence. This will be more difficult everywhere. So that means that any domain or community of practice should devote extra attention to their Basic Glossary. Not only defining but also maintaining and teaching new members about the importance of this list.
Split definition and basics from interpretation: this builds on the previous point. Although this is already standard practice in proper writing and information presentation, the skill should grow and be taken much more seriously in every part of the professional knowledge worker community.
Rituals to repeat/relearn/celebrate core texts: being one essential part of many religions already, this could become very beneficial to increase and maintain understanding. The development of these text should also be done through lenses of societal values. For example, they shall be inclusive, accessible, comprehensible, etc. Keeping in mind: minority groups, impairments that may limit the interaction, attention spans and other accessibility issues of current and future generations.
...
Eventually, we shall never underestimate the value of the spoken word. The spoken word by a human being, surrounded by an audience of other human beings. This is already different from a video of a speaking human being or - at the time of writing still obvious - video of artificial (computer-generated) multimedia speaking in natural language.
That, dear human friends, is the richest interaction form we have
Understanding another being is much more than the words. It is additionally their sound and the whole emotional and spiritual interaction that may grow among the conversationalists.
Emphasising this, I should like to end with a statement from Osho:
the spoken word has a warmth
the written word is cold
the spoken word has the heartbeat of the master
the spoken word is not just a word
is is still breathing when it reaches you
is has still some flavour
it is coming from a source of immense joy and light
it is bound to carry something of that fragrance
some radiation from that light
some vibe which may not be visible
but will stir your being
to listen to a master is one thing
and to read just the same words
is totally different
because the living presence of the master is no more behind the words
you can't see those eyes
you can't see those gestures
you can't see in those words the same authority
you can't feel those same silent gaps
Source: oshokushinagar.in (visited 10.05.2023)