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The knowledge apocalypse

For thousands of years, mankind has been accumulating knowledge and archiving it in a way that it will not be lost to future generations.

Well that's the theory anyway but sometimes things don't quite work out that way.

Need an example?

Well much of the knowledge needed to build the famous Saturn V booster used to get men to the moon has apparently been lost. This perhaps explains why we're having so much trouble repeating that feat even half a century later.

Instead of being able to harness the wealth of knowledge acquired during the development of the Saturn V, engineers have had to reinvent the wheel and that's not quite as easy as they thought it would be.

This example should serve as a worrying portent of the disaster we appear to be in the process of creating right now.

What am I talking about?

Well, for thousands of years we have committed our knowledge to hardcopy. Whether it was stone tablets in ancient Egypt or ink and paper in later times, this invaluable information has been stored on media that is intrinsically long-lived and independent of other technologies.

Books are great. You can store them in libraries for hundreds of years without any special treatment and the knowledge in them can be accessed without the need for complicated hi-tech equipment or even electricity.

Unfortunately, there has been a huge shift in the way we now store and archive knowledge.

Much of the newfound knowledge we rely on in our modern world isn't stored in hardcopy form. Most of it is stored digitally, often in that etherial medium we call "the cloud".

The benefits of this digital and cloud-based storage are immense. It means that anyone with an internet connection and a computer or smartphone can access a huge amount of this knowledge with just a few gestures or keystrokes. This has the potential to massive speed up the rates of research and innovation but it also carries a huge risk.

In the event of a huge planet-wide disaster, such as nuclear war, major asteroid impact or even a massive solar CME, much of the infrastructure required to access this digital knowledge-store could be lost.

As a result, decades worth of learning could be locked up in systems we can no longer access.

The lifespan of digitally stored data is also worryingly short.

Write valuable information to an SSD and within a decade it's likely to be lost, or at best significantly corrupted. Such devices are not designed for long-term data storage so if today's computers are rendered inoperative for any length of time the data they contain is at risk.

There is also an even bigger hole we're digging for ourselves...

When I was a primary school kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most important parts of the curriculum was "reading for comprehension". Others my age may also remember that, as kids, we were challenged with reading books and then answering questions to determine how well we had assimilated the contents of those books. I fondly recall the "Comprehension Series" of books used in our school as a numbered and coloured sequence of small journals that had to be worked through until they were completed. I think level 1 was white and at the end, level 10 was purple.

So what's this big risk I'm talking about?

Well it's (of course) AI.

The most common use of AI systems these days is that of having an AI agent scan a large chunk of written material and produce a synopsis, a summary of the key points. In effect, the AI is "reading for comprehension" -- the very thing that we were taught as a high priority in school.

If we continue to rely on AI to do this for us then we will inevitably lose that ability ourselves. Skills and abilities are like muscles, if we don't use them we will lose them. They will atrophy and waste away.

I see a real danger that in less than a generation, mankind will have offloaded the essential skill of reading for comprehension to AI. This means that if we do have to fall back to hardcopy material in the event of a major global catastrophe then we may well struggle to even make good use of the books we're left with.

Then there is the issue of problem-solving.

Social media constantly pushes people towards having shorter and shorter attention spans. YouTube pushes "shorts" in favour of long-form content, TikTok is entirely short-form content and X is a 128 character short burst of info. If we no longer have to pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds we will lose the ability to engage in extended concentration and focus. That will hugely impact our ability analyse and solve complex problems.

Perhaps it's time to recognise that our technology, despite its many benefits, is creating some significant weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the form of cognitive atrophy that will only get worse unless we take active steps to prevent it. Just as many people in the modern world go to the gym to strengthen their otherwise under-utilised muscles, perhaps we need to make sure we engage in some kind of "cogntitive workout" to maintain the levels of mental abilities which AI and other forms of modern technology place under threat.

Sadly, I've seen no recognition of this risk and no moves to mitigate it. I dread to think what level our mental abilities may have declined to in another 20 or 30 years' time and how we would cope in the event of a global catastrophe at that point in our evolution.

Carpe Diem folks!

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