Let us not forget, there’s a lot of knowledge out there currently under wraps due to national and corporate security.
In my AI class, our professor recently told us about Cyc, a project by an acquaintance of his to collect all common sense human knowledge into a first-order logic database. Apparently it’s had mixed results.
I think we need to distinguish quantity vs. quality because much of the significance of knowledge is relational. Not to say that Wikipeida or an AI program could do better but - you should factor in human intelligence. The sum of human knowledge…
That’s an interesting thought. I take it that your ellipsis points to the idea that the sum of human knowledge includes negative values–things “known” that are in fact false, misleading, or profoundly useless. These things subtract, or at least detract, from the sum.
Re the upthread comment about having and not being able to find, the Internet really shines in that respect. Things knowable are much more findable than they used to be. (Mcmaster.com, no affiliation, makes me feel like a mechanical near-genius.) Although what you find about a topic (unless it’s popular), might be much less than what is known and hidden in print somewhere.
About Borges, etc., the internet has the potential of being almost a higher-level infinity than, say, all of mankind’s libraries. Electronic knowledge is vastly smaller than print knowledge, and shrinking all the time. The Internet is entirely abstract, so the insertion of new knowledge is much easier than, say, making up a new Dewey Decimal number.
Look at Google Earth: the day could come soon when you might zoom in on my house, look at it from several angles, click on surrounding trees and shrubs to learn their taxonomic data, look up the birds, snakes, bugs and other critters likely to be living in my yard, look up the age and brand of shingles on my roof (posted by the roofer, of course, with contact info), and so forth.
This is all pretty superficial information, not requiring a great deal of storage (mostly links). But it’s not too much to imagine this sort of detail and more being available, in time, for the entire surface of the Earth–not just population centers.
Of course, once you know everything, or at least that everything is knowable, the question remains as to what one can do that’s useful? Offhand, I suspect it’s not what I’m doing now! :smack:
Hello
My name is José Sánchez-Cerezo de la Fuente.
I´ve designed a map of human knowledge that, I think, could be displayed on a Google-Earth like applet. Instead of showing the surface of the Earth, Google-Earth (or should I call it “Google-Knowledge”, jeje) would show all fields of studies on its surface (philosophy, science, arts, medicine, and so on) displayed in such a way that each field is placed near all its related fields, and the closer you look (using conventional zoom) the most precise the knowledge, or the information, or data, becames.
It can be used to organize libraries collections, internet sites, and whatever information thematicly organized.
Well, it´s just a thought, but here is a video with several designs, first in 2D and later on in 3D.
What do you think?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-5TBb235Fo
José
The British Library. If humans know about it, write it down, and publish it, it is to be found here.
If one could compile and digitize everything produced by humanity up to this moment, how much hard drive space would be required to store it? Wikipedia says the books contained in the Library of Congress would amount to about 20TB if stored as plain text.
He also kept on file every piece of mail he sent or received.
If I did that, just the junk mail that I get might take up that much space. And if I printed out all the email SPAM …
Impossible, peoples opinions change and opinions are knowledge, John may not like Sue but Charlie might, and their opinions about things may change over time. Knowing that John on Qst likes shadegrass may not even be true after a while. I mean I still have relatively new encyclopedias with false information about flight, some simpler phyiscs and the like
And if we’re assuming this extends to all humans, it would have to cover all languages, no? The British Library doesn’t have all this.
I believe the sum is 42.
Agreed. I mean, the NUMBER ONE thing that you think would be easily and freely available on the internet would be some kind of (centralized forward and reverse) phone directory. I mean, the internet has found a way to monetize every other seemingly trivial thing! You’d think Google would OCR paper phonebooks at least - they’ve OCR’d everything else, even if just for brand recognition.
The sum of all human knowledge goes by the name of Ivy.
I’m pretty sure it’s --> O
This attempt didn’t work out that well, but it was the closest thing to an actual effort that I can recall.
I would. You’ll only be around if you win.
Bear in mind much human knowledge is not capable of being reduced to writing or other forms of information sharing. How does Roger Federer serve a tennis ball in the way he has that is unique to him? How does a concert pianist make his fingers do what they do? One can describe what those things look like after the event, but not to the level where someone else can replicate them, too. Only Federer and Horowitz have the unique knowledge that they have of playing the way they do.
If they ever do get the sum of human knowledge together, let me know. You see, my grandmother left behind a lot of photographs. She labeled maybe one in thirty and I have no idea who the hell half of these people are. Some of them are probably relatives.