Knowledge capitalization and information fragmentation

In an increasingly complex world, knowledge is being broken down into smaller and smaller pieces,

Microdata are creating giga databases, so large that only superpowered brains can embrace the whole thing, leaving ordinary individuals now on the sidelines. A new discipline of knowledge management is opening up. And most of us will be dependent on artificial intelligences to keep up.

"This is the ambition of Knowledge Management, which today regulates much of the knowledge of the corporate world. Rationalization has led managers to encapsulate information, to make it modular, thus extirpating it from its initial logic to make strings of processes, models, behaviors...
...If the renaissance 600 years ago released knowledge as a radiant light to the point of taking the name of the Age of Enlightenment, our revolution could perhaps be called the Age of Crystal.
So many rays of light artificially encapsulated that shine with a thousand lights. The resulting worries are that the school does not yet teach to distinguish the good from the bad, the reasonable first step would be to follow this encapsulation process to understand it and develop pedagogical processes or techniques adapted to these new situations."

Source: From "light" knowledge to crystallized knowledge - Virginie Guignard Legros
https://cursus.edu/fr/27092/de-la-connaissance-lumiere-a-la-connaissance-cristallisee

Our world has entered a new door.

We have just realized with the arrival of ChatGPT how weak we are in the face of knowledge and the need to go further, to leave our place for tasks we thought were immutable but soon will have no interest in our civilization.

"Everyday applications of ChatGPT

The emergence of AI in our technologies is about to disrupt our relationship with the machine. If it can be a source of ethical questioning regarding its use and its place in our societies, artificial intelligence also worries many professionals and artists. This is particularly the case for writers. While some see it as a fantastic tool, others consider the use of these intelligent machines to be dangerous.
Why use ChatGPT?
ChatGPT proves to be efficient in all creative fields and saves us precious time in the realization of redundant tasks. Its ability to process a very large amount of data makes it particularly formidable in the analysis and interpretation of situations, especially in the medical field. In addition, OpenAI makes available to companies, its API to integrate ChatGPT. The tool can perform simple tedious tasks like ordering a list, but also perform more complex tasks like generating lines of code.

Source: ChatGPT, what is it? - April 2023
https://www.numerama.com/sciences/1200230-cest-quoi-chatgpt-on-a-laisse-chatgpt-repondre-a-la-question.html

As you can see, if you like doing simple, tedious tasks like memorizing sums of knowledge, chances are you won't be able to find a job tomorrow. Working on memories will not make sense in the future. However, memory work is one of the current pillars of learning in school. And, the choices that schools make in this or that country can have enormous consequences on the societies of tomorrow, as they format the choices of today.

Explaining our educational biases.

In Switzerland, for example, companies recruit their salespeople abroad and art schools generate very good everyday artists but not many artists of wonder. Why is that? Around the age of 13 or 14, children are directed to either the general or the pre-gymnasium track. In Switzerland there is no determination of the professional path because there are bridges everywhere. You can do an apprenticeship in hairdressing and end up as a civil engineer. It is possible, indeed for the most determined and courageous, but let's be clear that a very high percentage of students who embark on a path at age 13 will stay there their whole lives.

In Switzerland the selection is made on 3 basic criteria: grades in French, German and Mathematics. Why this focus on languages rather than on history, biology or other subjects that can be found in other countries? In fact, in order to study at a very high level in Switzerland, you have to be able to speak German. And, if your level of German is not good, you have no chance to go to gymnasium (or Lycée) or to do university studies. Whereas in France, if you are good in language, you will be directed towards a secondary university path, because France is more focused on sciences and mathematics. And, these 3 chosen disciplines correspond to a left brain intellectual preponderance.

What exactly do the left and right brain correspond to?

"The brain is composed of two hemispheres, left and right, which have different but complementary ways of functioning. The left hemisphere is associated with logical, analytical reasoning, language and memory. The right hemisphere is linked to intuition, emotion, creativity and facial recognition. According to one theory, there are personalities that are more dominated by one side of the brain than the other, which influences how they think and act."

Source: Left Brain VS Right Brain - 2018
https://www.psychologue.net/articles/cerveau-gauche-vs-cerveau-droit

Actually, it's less about the geography in the brain and more about how you use your brain. When university selection is based on languages as in Switzerland, then Switzerland by its choice creates mostly intellectuals who are logical, analytical... and few of them are sensitive to all that the right brain brings, i.e. intuition, emotion, creativity... everything that makes a good creative, a good artistic professional and a good businessman everywhere else in the world.

The idea here is not to point the finger at Switzerland, but rather to explain how school can have an important effect on the economy and on the future of our societies. Because, where artificial intelligence is not yet good, it is on everything that does not depend on logic and therefore the disciplines of the right brain. Tomorrow, having a long memory will not be useful anymore, having a good logic to classify, sort... either. The languages will always be different but the translations will be simultaneous, where will the human being get the best of it?

So already, if we look at the mutations of history.

If a mutation takes its place, it is because the community that welcomes it is ready to follow it. There is no innovation in the world that just happens to destroy a civilization. This does not exist. If knowledge arrives, it will take 20 or 50 years to arrive, it is never ex nihilo. For an innovation or a mutation to take shape, the level of consciousness of a civilization must be ready to welcome it. And, already in a first time, be ready to understand what it is. A phenomenon may be dormant for years, because it is invisible, incomprehensible by all. Anything that is not understood does not exist.

"The idea of existence is thought of first by distinction from essence. Essence is conceived as logically and ontologically prior to existence. It includes in itself the law of formation of any singular reality. Nothing in it is superfluous; it cannot change. Since the slightest alteration would destroy its identity, it cannot become, acquire or lose characters while remaining itself... If therefore we call sense, the necessary coherence that the intelligence is able to represent and to formulate, it is necessary to say that the essence, par excellence, is bearer of sense. The existence is contingent with regard to the essence: it is possible that this or that does not exist. On the other hand, what exists, insofar as it stands in the world, participates in an essence... If therefore existence seems meaningless, this is due to a form of blindness that prevents us from relating existence to essence."

Source: Le sens de l'existence, un faux problème ? by Frédéric Laupies - 2028
https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2018-2-page-4.htm

If our world is changing and we are aware of it, it means we are ready to take the next step. What could it be?

Knowledge capitalization is one of the fundamental problems I have been thinking about for almost 10 years. We have a limited lifespan and our understanding is limited by the capacity of our brain. That is to say that if each of us starts the field of knowledge at zero when we begin our life, as we are not all exactly equal some of us will arrive at very different levels of understanding. For the past century, our communal evolution seems to have entered a process of stagnation.

"In the first half of the nineteenth century, schooling becomes a state affair. Throughout Europe, administrations were created to supervise and foster its development. Driven by the spread of revolutionary ideals, the demand for education, the needs arising from industrialization and the emergence of nations, the states took the education of their peoples into their own hands, sometimes against the churches, sometimes in concert with them.

The secularization of the school, sometimes its secularization, was observed rather in the first 20th century. The European educational systems then often functioned according to a segregated logic: the future elites were educated in secondary school, based on the classical humanities, while the children of the people were educated in primary school, which provided elementary and practical knowledge. Further into the twentieth century, pupils were gradually brought together in a single curriculum up to secondary school, in the context of the democratization and massification of secondary schooling - which began after 1945 - and then of higher education - which is still ongoing. If, in the field of schooling, the European Union encourages cooperation, the States remain sovereign, and the particularities specific to educational traditions are still alive."

Source:State and School in Europe (xixe-xxie siècles)
https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedie/th%C3%A9matiques/%C3%A9ducation-and-training/d%C3%A9mocratizations-and-in%C3%A9equality/%C3%A9schools-in-Europe/%C3%A9state-and-%C3%A9schools-in-Europe-xixth-xxth-century-si%C3%A8cles

Stagnation because we have reached the limit of what is possible to do each in our own corner due to the competitive ecosystem.

A couple of decades ago the discipline of collective intelligence emerged, along with the beginnings of artificial intelligence. It is no coincidence that the first book that will deal with Collective Intelligence is that of Pierre Levy and that according to his theory, it is completely interconnected with cyberspace.

"The magic of virtual worlds is now within the reach of the general public: the number of users of global computerized communication networks is increasing by 10% per month. The Internet and interactive multimedia herald a change in the way people communicate and access knowledge. A new environment of communication, thought and work for human societies is emerging: cyberspace. How will our culture be affected by this? Will we only end up with a super-television or will we renew the social link in the sense of a greater fraternity?

Pierre Lévy invites us in this book to think no longer in terms of the impact of techniques on society, but in terms of a project. The new means of communication allow human groups to pool their imaginations and their knowledge. As a new social form, the intelligent collective can invent a "real-time democracy". The author places the project of collective unintelligence in a long-term anthropological perspective. After having been founded on the relationship to the cosmos, then on belonging to territories, and finally on insertion in the economic process, the identity of people and the social bond could soon blossom in the exchange of knowledge."

Source: L'intelligence collective, Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace - 1997
https://www.decitre.fr/livre-pod/l-intelligence-collective-9782707126931.html

Pierre Levy is also the father of IEML.

"It is an artificial language that integrates the possibilities of technologies to transcend languages and undoubtedly also a new science of knowledge management. In history, each evolution in this field has had an effect on lives and economies at all levels of society.
First there was the creation of symbols with writing, then their structuring with the alphabet, in the 16th century the multiplication of symbols with printing, in the 20th century the industrialization of this multiplication by the electronic media.
As for the 21st century, it is the era of the manipulation of symbols both by artificial intelligence programs and at the same time by their display on millions of media at the same time.
Through the mathematical structuring of natural language, the IEML proposes to make the link between our brains and knowledge. Thus this one goes to a higher level while building on the previous evolution of technology."

Source: IEML, the universal language of the future - March 2019 -
https://cursus.edu/fr/12449/lieml-le-langage-universel-du-futur

IEML is a semantic language for universal classification of languages and content. You search for the word cat with google or ChatGPT and everything that comes up will be based on either the word cat or a variation of the word cat. And, 80% of the knowledge of the chat universe not tagged "Chat" will escape you. Whereas, IEML will be able to open up a quantum dimension to this research given as an example.

10 years ago, a group working on collective intelligence was entrusted to me

...because it had been in existence for 3 years and had the mission to deliver a book based on the capitalization of everyone's knowledge and apart from nice discussions, there was never a deliverable.

What was the problem? In fact, Pierre Levy's book had come out 15 years earlier. Just enough time to make its way among his colleagues and then among the specialists who were beginning to experiment on the subject. And we were in the middle of experimenting. Except that it was always a failure. What was happening was that collective intelligence was still a theory. A great experiment.

But not a state of consciousness as we can find in many people today who have fled or no longer want to enter a hierarchical system. And, so our great specialists were all posing together with their respective egos.

They spent their time listening to others and staying in their own positions. Whereas, to capitalize on knowledge one must learn to leave one's ego at the door, to take a mass of knowledge from diverse origins and make it a unique collective knowledge. But, 10 years were necessary in between to realize this.

And, this is the challenge of tomorrow. This is exactly where the machines will not be able to keep up for a long time. They will not be able to imagine the new logics. Currently, they follow a logic or principles of logic. They will not be able to reduce a knowledge to a concept, to a seed from which universes can be infinitely declined.

Currently, people are dazzled by ChatGPT until the day they realize that it is just a machine that follows a logic that has been programmed into it. Whereas the world can really be regulated by other logics.

In Collective Intelligence, the concept of 1+1=3 is a basis for understanding the power of the collective.

Nothing that this seed of logic is illogical to many machines. To the question posed to ChatGPT on what is collective intelligence?

"Collective intelligence: when the whole is greater than the sum of its heads. When individuals come together and work together to achieve a common goal, something magical can happen: collective intelligence. This concept describes the ability of groups to make more informed decisions, solve complex problems, and innovate more than any of its members could have done individually.

Collective intelligence can be revealed in many situations, from the evolution of species in nature, to the efficiency of ants working together to build colonies, to even the collaboration of groups of scientists to solve complex problems. However, it is only recently that businesses and organizations have begun to recognize the value of collective intelligence to their own success. In an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world, the challenges that businesses face are often too large to be solved by an individual or a small team. This is where collective intelligence can...".

That's not wrong, but from my perspective it remains superficial. So let's leave the superficial things to the machines and create philosophers, ethnologists, academics, thinkers who will be able to guide the machines in the right direction. Let's not repeat our habits, let's be, be the builders of our future by your educational choices.

To capitalize on knowledge, we need to be able to take over someone else's work in class. For if everyone starts over, our limited lives will not allow us to advance further. From the moment we can take up a work in progress without wanting to predigest all previous knowledge. By trusting the work of the predecessors, then the knowledge will be able to evolve to a level 2, then 3, ... And, this is what we must strive for.

Image source: Pixabay - Mysticsartdesign