What would be the next thing in information-management technology?

[BrainGlutton]

I don’t mean just increases in computing power/speed/whatever, I mean “information management technology” in a broader sense.

From The Outline of History (1920), by H.G. Wells, 24.1, “The Science of Alexandria”:

It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. The Alexandrian author had to dictate or recopy every word he wrote. Before he could turn back to what he had written previously, he had to dry his last words by waving them in the air or pouring sand over them; he had not even blotting paper. Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied again and again before it could reach any considerable circle of readers, and every copyist introduced some new error. Whenever a need for maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh difficulties. Such a science as anatomy, for example, depending as it does upon accurate drawing, must have been enormously hampered by the natural limitations of the copyist. The transmission of geographical fact again must have been almost incredibly tedious. No doubt a day will come when a private library and writing-desk of the year A.D. 1919 will seem quaintly clumsy and difficult; but, measured by the standards of Alexandria, they are astonishingly quick, efficient, and economical of nervous and mental energy.

Putting the above still further in perspective, consider how well-equipped the librarians at Alexandria were compared to those of Library of Ashurbanipal, and to all earlier librarians in Mesopotamia, to whom 1 page of text = 1 clay tablet. Four centuries passed from Ashurbanipal’s time to the foundation of the Library of Alexandria; another 23 centuries before information-management technology reached the point Wells describes above.

And now, 90 years after Wells wrote, a private library and writing-desk of the year A.D. 1919 does seem quaintly clumsy and difficult. Here I sit, at a single computer terminal with no paper resources within arm’s reach. With that one instrument, and without getting up, I can write text, edit it, print it; send and receive emails; access, not all information in print (yet), but several libraries’ worth of information online, including many reliable reference sources, and a lot of resources that did not exist in any form pre-Internet; and all that from a single Google search; copy and paste from one window to another instead of tedious character-by-character typing. I can easily find and play clips of music or film – not everything (yet), but a lot. All that and Rule 34! Wow!

So – what’s next? When information-management technology is as far advanced from its present state as today’s is from that of 1919 – so much so that today’s seems quaintly clumsy and difficult – what will it be like, how will it be different, and how long will it take to get there?

[Voyager]

One thing will be to put some more smarts in the search engine. Now we get a ton of crap back, and it takes some skill to craft a query that will get you what you want. What we need is an assistant who can look through the search results, sort them into several categories, and ask which of them you are really interested in, and in that way refine things down until all the stuff you get is stuff you really want.

An analogy. We visited Oxford in 1980, and one of the people we met was doing her PhD on legal history. The library had pretty much every book ever published in England - but at that time the books were all entered in order of acquisition. A specific request for an old book would take days to fulfill. Back then, they had all the information, but not in a very useful format. Information on the Web is not that bad, but it could be better.

[Lakai]

Access to information isn’t the problem now. Anything can be put online for anyone to access it. The next step forward is to change how we find information. I’m sure the folks at Google are spending most of their time thinking about this.

I imagine that the real life version of the HAL 9000 computer will be Google with voice recognition technology. I don’t think it will answer you back, but it will learn to recognize what you say and bring up whatever you need once you say it.

Is there any information that isn’t online that needs to be digitized? Books and photos of public streets used to be the notable hold outs until Google took care of that.

[John_Mace]

You’re kinda asking two different questions:

What’s next

and

When information-management technology is as far advanced from its present state as today’s is from that of 1919

For the latter, I’d say direct human brain/computer interface. 100 years hence, I expect we’ll be able to control computers with our minds and even if they don’t talk to us back telepathically, they’ll be able at least to whisper in our ear. I call it “the little bird” technology.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

You’re kinda asking two different questions:

What’s next

and

When information-management technology is as far advanced from its present state as today’s is from that of 1919

For the latter, I’d say direct human brain/computer interface. 100 years hence, I expect we’ll be able to control computers with our minds and even if they don’t talk to us back telepathically, they’ll be able at least to whisper in our ear. I call it “the little bird” technology.

Good point. There will be many a “What’s next?” between now and brain-computer interface. Which, if it could talk to us telepathically, would mean we could also talk to each other telepathically – mechanically assisted telepathy. Which, in principle, could lead to the Borg Collective. (For a more optimistic take, see Spider Robinson’s Lifehouse Trilogy.)

[Voyager]

@John_Mace

You’re kinda asking two different questions:

What’s next

and

When information-management technology is as far advanced from its present state as today’s is from that of 1919

For the latter, I’d say direct human brain/computer interface. 100 years hence, I expect we’ll be able to control computers with our minds and even if they don’t talk to us back telepathically, they’ll be able at least to whisper in our ear. I call it “the little bird” technology.

I’m dubious about this. It implies that we’d have to train our minds a lot better than we do now, or else a search for the won-loss record of the Lunar Dodgers would come back with porn. As would a search for cars, or cameras or …

[BrainGlutton]

@Voyager

I’m dubious about this. It implies that we’d have to train our minds a lot better than we do now, or else a search for the won-loss record of the Lunar Dodgers would come back with porn. As would a search for cars, or cameras or …

Well, “porn” now means full-immersion reality-based VR, like in Strange Days, so where’s the down side?

(I guess I’ll find out the answer first time I’m inadvertently exposed to a gay or B&D site . . .)

[BrainGlutton]

Of course, if we’re talking about “the mechanism of the intellectual life,” I guess porn doesn’t really count . . . A lot of stuff on the Internet doesn’t really count . . .

[Lumpy]

I see a connection between the idea of direct-brain access and improved data search/organization tools. What if by directly referencing our thoughts a search engine could figure out just what information we want?

[TriPolar]

The next will be computers that converse with ordinary humans and program themselves, and debug themselves, and I will have no job. All of my fellow systems developers have belonged to a secret society that has known how to accomplish this for decades, and we have successfully kept the secret of self programming computers hidden, but eventually one will spill the beans. A few have threatened to do so in the past, requiring us to go along with their plan to market sub-standard systems software to the public. But someday one of them will go rogue, and we will all be out of work.

[ultrafilter]

There are a lot of information retrieval problems that are easy for humans, but hard to get computers to do, and that’s what people are really working on right now. Here are a few interesting questions that I’ve seen presentations on recently:
[ul]
[li]Given a collection of documents, what are the various topics represented therein, and which documents belong to each topic?[/li][li]Given a collection of related news stories over time, which sequence gives the best summary of what happened?[/li][li]Given a bunch of clips from a TV series, how do we find all of the ones that contain a given character?[/li][li]Given a bunch of reviews for one category of products and an algorithm that can differentiate the positive ones from the negative, how do we classify reviews for a different category of products?[/li][li]How do we query uncertain data?[/li][/ul]
These are roughly in order of how soon I expect to see good answers to them, based on my knowledge of related fields.