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Originally Posted by Eyeball Kid  |
I read that article from Cascio the other day, and the one thing that stuck out is this (probably unitentional) thread of celebrating intellectual laziness running under it. He seems to believe that, while intelligence augmentation devices won't be implanted in us, external technology will somehow be able to make qualitative decisions about the validity of retrieved data.
I understand what he's saying about the changing nature of intelligence to something that's more dynamic rather than storage-based, but the problem is that he puts utmost emphasis on information retrieval and virtually none on information evaluation. He alludes to it:
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| Any occupation requiring pattern-matching and the ability to find obscure connections will quickly morph from the domain of experts to that of ordinary people whose intelligence has been augmented by cheap digital tools. Humans won’t be taken out of the loop—in fact, many, many more humans will have the capacity to do something that was once limited to a hermetic priesthood. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity. |
But exactly what are the digital tools that will enable a human to be more discriminating? This is left completely vague, and it's the single most important issue here to my mind. In information retrieval, we'll always be faced with the twin factors of precision and recall. One must always be sacrificed for the sake of the other. If you want all possibly valid information on a topic, you're inevitably going to end up with bum hits. If you want all information that's very likely valid about a topic, you'll end up with fewer hits.
The reason is that we can only access data by word searches, and syntax is inherently subjective. Ultimately, it will always be up to not machines, but people, whose uses of vocabulary in conducting searches will always be subjective and fallible, to decide whether information is a) relevant and b) accurate. Technology may give us the means to find information more quickly, but people (specifically, experts) are going to be required to make that information accessible (through classification systems, innovations in keyword searching, etc.), and, even more importantly, laypersons are going to need a hell of a lot more education in terms of information literacy than they have now.
You can't cure information illiteracy with a computer. We'll always need some level of acquired, as well as fluid, knowledge to be discriminating users of information.
