On February 19, Brewster Kahle wrote:

> [on a recent trip to India, Dr Om Vikas from the Ministry of
> Information gave a presentation and one of the slides really hit me
> hard. I have reproduced it here, with permission. This is the
> first time I have ever heard someone question the accepted meme
> of our knowledge explosion. Even if I disagree with the fringes,
> it is a bold and interesting point. Maybe an analogy with the loss
> of biological diversity stands: there are more biomass on earth, but
> of fewer types. -brewster ]
>
> Is there gain in knowledge or loss of knowledge?

I think of knowledge more as a vehicle than a destination, more as CPU
cycles than as bits stored on a disk. Today, very few drivers know
how an engine works, because they don't need to. But only forty years
ago, almost every driver knew this in detail. Has that knowledge been
lost? Yes, and for a good reason. The vehicle has brought us to
where we are now, we drop the first stage of the rocket and use the
second stage from here. A few years ago, many learned to code HTML.
Today, they are using blogs or "web content management" tools, and
don't need to know HTML anymore. Unlearning HTML has been a lot
faster than unlearning the inner workings of a car engine.

In the 19th century Swedish encyclopedia that I'm digitizing, there is
a lot of detail on things that nobody needs to know today. That
information will still be available, but very few will consider it
essential.

Knowledge, just like CPU cycles and miles driven, is increased by
wider use. You can preserve an encyclopedia (or a language) in a
single copy, but you cannot force people to continue to use it after
they feel it is obsolete. In order to "preserve" a language from
extinction, you would have to forbid some number of human individuals
from speaking another language of their choice. This would be like
banning hammers if they threaten screw drivers to extinction. Or
making a carburator theory test mandatory for a drivers license.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@...)
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/