We start with a stock of barley and beer rations. Clay tablets engraved with cuneiform pictograms record the bread and beer routines of daily life in Mesopotamia around 3100 BC We conclude with another type of tablet, a touchscreen type, that puts almost the entire sum of knowledge at your fingertips Human.
Simon Winchester recounts that five-millennium journey and much more in a book that confirms its prolific author’s gift for “engaging storytelling, vivid descriptions and extensive research” in works that “explore the intersections of science, history and culture and seek to discover the human stories behind significant events and discoveries”.
Full disclosure: Those quoted words, which all your readers will endorse, are courtesy of ChatGPT and his response to my Winchester question. Formidably updated, Know what we know in part discusses the controversial AI tool and the “extraordinary speed” of its evolution. He fuels some uneasy reflections on the digital revolution in knowledge access and retrieval. Does the overwhelming firepower of algorithmic helpers now ‘relieve tension from the brain’ threaten ‘digital amnesia’ or does it mean that in the future humans will not have ‘You don’t need to know anything’?
From the schools of ancient Sumeria and Aboriginal “song lines” to GPS, Wikipedia, Google and beyond, Winchester traverses human history of information storage and transmission in a spectacle of colorful and eloquent tableaux. Along the way she worries, as did Plato when he criticized the writing in his Phaedrus (c. 370 BC), that technological enhancements to our knowledge can impair memory, weaken judgment, and make true wisdom harder to attain.
As everyone in the news industry understands, metadata matters. How you order, describe and store (actually or virtually) your material determines its lasting value. For this reason, it would be a mistake to classify Know what we know as a formal history of how humans have preserved, sorted and transmitted knowledge – from the folk wisdom that enabled the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands to spot the warning signs of the 2004 tsunami to the marriage of hypertext, the Internet and the global information network transmitted through it which (as the book lucidly explains) now satisfies our curiosity.
This is a much more bizarre, more subjective and lateral thinking project. Winchester interrupts his broadly chronological progression with leaps and swerves, chivalrous digressions and anecdotes. The story twists and turns in a spiral. Thus Douglas Engelbart’s demonstration of hyperlinks in San Francisco in 1968 appears first after a section on museums and memory, returning much later as a cornerstone of the development of search engines.
Winchester has a fondness for eccentric filing systems, such as that employed in the “magical and clublike” London Library. Even his wanderings produce fortuitous discoveries and creative encounters: a pity that he omits Aby Warburg, who organized his great library (now the Warburg Institute) for that purpose. Still, we enjoy a challenging array of jumping knight moves (say) from American SAT tests to Chinese “fierce and brutal” gaokao examination; or from Wikipedia’s enlistment of “hive mind” to ensure accuracy up to the Oxford English Dictionary and its 1850 enlistment of the “wisdom of crowds”.
Winchester’s recollections of a lifetime of hunting for knowledge as a journalist and author provide several memorable passages: seeing his reports from Northern Ireland of Bloody Sunday in 1972 confirmed, 38 years later; or revisit a dangerous journey on a small boat in the Indian Ocean with the “estimated calculation” in the pre-GPS days.
Don’t pigeonhole Know what we know as “information science”. Rather, think of it as an intellectual autobiography: an account from a richly stocked and ever-curious mind of the multiple ways stored knowledge can pave the way for understanding. It could have been tighter, sharper, less repetitive or even (sometimes) contradictory. Yet Winchester’s narrative has such panache and liveliness that you forgive the zigzagged and scattered nature of the search for him.
Artificial intelligence, he warns, could soon “devastate those who are just smart and just plain smart.” Instead, he celebrates the polymath: not just “a figure from a bygone age” but perhaps—from Bertrand Russell to Richard Feynman—the model for convergent and connective habits of thought that move information up the ladder, through knowledge and towards wisdom. In this more promising view, those superintelligent machines now overshadowing our imaginations and professions can become servants, not masters, if they free us to “sit down and reap the benefits of our ability to think once more.”
Know what we know: The transmission of knowledge from ancient wisdom to modern magic by Simon Winchester, William Collins £25, 400 pages
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