Jens,

I finally get to your essay and cannot believe how close it is to mine (here).

I am in total agreement with the repository concept:

- "Steering the future hinges on the availability of scientific and cultural data from the past". You seem to imply that this data be limited to those involved in "decision making" in the past. I emphasize that a part of this data (the part that describes the 'what' and not the 'why' of effect-cause natural relationships) be explicitly made available to the global public.

- Your motivation is "digital amnesia"; my motivation is enabling more people to remedy their individual life-limiting natural circumstances; We are both seeking humanity's future with benefit for the masses: you start with the masses as a unit while I am starting from the individuals that comprise the masses.

Please let me know if I understand you correctly. I am looking forward to your comments on my essay (here).

- Ajay

    Dear Jens Niemeyer,

    We agree on that discoveries, inventions, and other immaterial goods are treasures that deserve to be used and to be preserved to some extent. The loss of the ancient library of Alexandria was not too bad for two reasons:

    - There were books at other places too.

    - New approaches led out of deadlocks.

    Let's learn from human brain: Permanent selection of what is worth to be stored and forgetting of the rest is indispensable.

    This contest should be understood as asking for basic questions, not just as an opportunity to justify demanding funding.

    I enjoyed using Goettingen's digitalization of immature scientific work as a chance to reveal basic flaws e.g. by Georg Cantor. Therefore I appreciate the belonging funding. The chance to save treasures might be larger with redundancies and distributed locations of deposits.

    Some physicists who met in Goettingen after WWII are known for their utterance concerning the topic that I dealt with in my essay. I would like to know your view too.

    Eckard

    James,

    Thank you! Trying to answer your question, I believe it will be unavoidable that some (in fact, most) information won't be conserved, for purely practical reasons. Deciding which information to keep will perhaps be a never-ending challenge and dispute for humanity, but I argue that it can also be a healthy process, as it will help humanity find its common values. Of course, this process needs to be peaceful and transparent, and it must offer every human being a chance to participate.

    Jens

    Daniel,

    What I had in mind was a hierarchy of systems from high-technology, high-capacity data centers to long-lived low-tech, low-capacity devices along the lines of robust e-ink readers. But obviously this is a moving target with many opportunities for research. Glad you like it!

    I didn't know of the Long Now Foundation when I submitted the article, but I have been made aware of it by other authors. Certainly something I will follow up.

    Jens

    Tom,

    Glad you liked the idea, thank you. And I agree that the theme of network robustness overlaps with some ideas in your article - very interesting analogy!

    Jens

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    • Post #32

    Ajay,

    Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

    I emphatically agree that access to the repository must not be limited to those involved in decision making. In fact, I believe that access to this condensed source of human knowledge should be considered a human right (even though I doubt that this is a realistic near-term goal). We are completely on the same side on this issue.

    While I put some emphasis on digital amnesia as an existential (and avoidable) risk, I also point out that the repository would serve an important purpose as a tool for education and research in "normal" times. Again, it seems that we basically agree on the goals, starting from different motivations. This makes both of our cases stronger, I think.

    I am looking forward to reading your article this weekend. Good luck!

    Jens

    Dear Prof. Niemeyer,

    This repository knowledge for humanity is a necessity for our humanity. Excellent essay and I especially like what you wrote here: "Ideally, a knowledge repository should allow flexible navigation in depth and breadth at an arbitrary level of detail ("multi-resolution") within the space of (appropriately linked) fields of knowledge ("multi-dimensional"). In other words, it should provide overlapping maps of the space of human knowledge with adjustable resolution, i.e. an atlas of knowledge space. Clearly, the atlas must continually evolve by ingesting new information and re-organizing existing correlations. This can only be achieved if the repository acquires a certain (and growing) degree of autonomy using artificial intelligence, combined with human supervision, for creating and updating maps."

    Thanks for sharing your solution to us.

    Best wishes,

    Leo KoGuan

    Jens,

    Thank you for an inspiring essay. You brilliantly made the case that digital amnesia is a real danger in case of sudden civilization decline, and that it is important to think of ways to build a robust knowledge repository that could speed up civilization's "rebirth", if the need ever arises. You also rightly mentioned that building a knowledge repository is a worthwhile endeavor by itself, even if no catastrophe ever befalls us, because of its potential for research and education.

    In our hyper-connected world, we are overwhelmed by a deluge of information, and I think that in our incessant drive towards the new, we do not spend enough efforts in synthesizing the information we already know. If we want to build a compact knowledge repository, we have to prioritize, make choices, even improve the pedagogical efficiency of our best learning materials in order to ensure that we could start again by using this information.

    In my essay, I proposed that we should try to put forward a worldwide futurocentric education initiative, aimed at raising the knowledge and awareness of the citizens of the world about the issues that are the most important for the future of humanity. In order for the initiative to be successful, we will need to carefully construct an optimal futurocentric curriculum: I believe there could be a lot of overlap between the content of the futurocentric curriculum and what we would preserve in a knowledge repository... so there is certainly a lot of synergy between our proposals.

    How about a Futurocentric Repository and Education Initiative? I think Leibowitz would be proud! :)

    Marc

      Marc,

      Thank you for your remarks and suggestions. I absolutely agree that education and conservation of knowledge are deeply linked. In fact, to some extent they depend on each other, as I also tried to explain in my article. There is indeed a lot of synergy in our ideas. I very much enjoyed reading your article (see my comments in your forum). Good luck!

      Jens

      Sorry, Marc, I accidentally wrote my reply into a separate thread, see below.

      Jens

      Hi Jens,

      nice original ideas, well expressed, with adequate structure, and sufficiently topical - I think your essay deserves high positions in the ranking.

      One aspect that could have been a bit more developed (or, that I did not grasp well enough) is this idea of `bootstrapping` after a global disaster. Is this qualitatively different from a huge data recovery process? How is this influenced by the status (in the widest sense of the word) of the `survivors`?

      You also write: `until all the necessary infrastructure has been recreated to access the entire data (which might be centuries later)`. How can this process take so long? Which stages would you envisage in between? When you write `it must also provide the means for accessing and copying digital data without computers, data connections, or even electricity` what do you have in mind? New forms of stored energy that can power these systems for decades?

      It occurred to me that a mention to Wolfram Alpha could have been appropriate, given its ambition to collect the body of human knowledge in a more easily accessible repository than Google.

      The aspect that I found most original and stimulating is that of comparing the advanced smartest version of the repository to the human brain, with its ability to continuously store new data, integrate and learn. This scenario is perfectly in line with the complex-system-oriented vision at humanity, with the sphere of knowledge (the `noosphere`) implemented by the Web and its future versions representing the brain of the super-organism emerging from the interactions among humans and human societies. The puzzling and fascinating problem that I see, in this respect, is about the extent to which individual humans can eventually take conscious part to the super-life of the emergent super-organism (the ant-anthill duality).

      Best regards

      Tommaso

        Hi Jens,

        The repository you propose is indeed essential for a more secure human future. I believe that appropriate persons and institutions should step forward to work out the first steps that you mention at the top of page 8. We can begin now to implement your ideas.

        Laurence Hitterdale

        Jens,

        Glad to know we have the same goal with the individual in mind.

        Glad you take my essay as encouragement! That's exactly why I wrote it.

        Would appreciate any comments on that what restricts your sharing. Thank you.

        The very best of luck to you too.

        -- Ajay

        Jens,

        Time grows short, so I am going back to my comments for rating. Your past response below to my questions do ring true:

        "It is not only cataclysmic events that threaten the access to information by individuals. Any substantial decline in technological infrastructure, including one triggered by climate change and/or social instabilities, will suffice. In fact, just having the "wrong" kind of leadership prevents parts of the human population from getting access to essential information even now. Making sure that this cannot happen on a global scale is what concerns me."

        My essay's contention does run along these lines and sees "looking beyond" our solar system and our greed concerns, as well as "looking within," our minds, the microcosm of the universe, as the solution. This while garnering leadership with reason.

        Jim

          Tommaso,

          Thanks, great questions! Let me try to answer some of them.

          The idea of the "bootstrapping mode" is to allow the survivors of a global disaster to recover from a complete breakdown of infrastructure, in which case data recovery, education, and reconstruction of infrastructure have to go hand in hand in a highly intertwined, incremental fashion. The deeper the cultural setback, the more elementary the starting point of this process will have to be. Perhaps it must even begin with reading and writing lessons. How exactly this can be done I really don't know, it is one of the many challenges of the project.

          That said, let me stress that solving the bootstrapping problem is in absolutely no way a prerequisite for working on other important aspects of the repository (although I think it's one of the most fascinating problems). And yes, Wolfram Alpha is certainly worth mentioning in this context, thanks for the reminder.

          Your last point of course raises many deep questions which go far beyond the very practical purposes that I outlined. At which point the repository might reach a level of complexity that gives rise to a new form of super-organism (or even consciousness), and whether we would even notice if it did, is truly intriguing. I leave this to the experts and look forward to following the debate!

          Jens

          Jim,

          I finally got to read your article and commented it in your forum. Good luck!

          Jens

          Because it pertains here also..

          I am re-posting this comment I made on the essay page of Leo KoGuan, hoping it will generate some interest or discussion.

          But are people ready for a scientific ethical and legal system? I have been working for a number of years now to create a framework for qualitative or subjective search engines and databases, and I've even included some of the fruits of my research in that area in my FQXi essays, so it will be clear to all that this model follows from my prior work. Personally; I'd rather work with R2-D2 and C3PO than work for a Terminator style robot, and this is a necessary step in that direction. However; if we did create this technology, and fed into the computer works of the great philosophers, religious texts, legal documents, and so on; it would calculate percentage truth-values for various assertions contained therein.

          Of course; it will cause the worst scandal in history when people realize that a computer is being made the arbiter of their religion. This is why such things must be handled with some sensitivity. It is also why I think the proposal of Jens Niemeyer for a repository of knowledge is important to humanity's survival, and deserves the development and use of such technology. This goes way beyond the Dewey decimal system, and could be a way to achieve a scientific level of fair representation - which is a necessary step in your plan - but will ordinary humans be willing to set cherished beliefs aside, in order to realize a bright future instead of dystopia?

          What are your thoughts, Jens?

          Regards,

          Jonathan

          I have a much simpler way of preserving knowledge in the event of a global collapse or dark age. It is to place it on more permanent media. Probably the most durable media for preserving knowledge is the clay tablet. Archeologists manage to find these from thousands of years back. The Egyptians made steles going back to 3000BC with stone, and these are readable. Of course we don't want to go back to that sort of thing, but paper printing is probably fairly good. The more modern the form of storage media it seems the less permanent it is.

          The digital age is largely producing information that is not terribly valuable. The internet is filled with videos of cats and dogs, bloopers, pornography, social media pages, advertisements and so forth that are not really of any great intellectual depth. If people want to write accounts of what people were thinking and doing for posterity based on these data that could be done now. The percentage of information content that has any depth to it is a diminishing percentage of internet content.

          To preserve humanity's basic knowledge content it might just be a matter of maintaining books in print, and of maintaining the technology required to print books. The older the technology it could well be that would serve our purposes for maintaining a durable knowledge base. This should also be duplicated in many places around the world. It is my suspicion that a new form of totalitarianism is beginning to take shape, particularly in the United States, and it would be best to have multiple repositories around the world with the ability to reproduce books. In that way fundamental knowledge is less likely to be lost in "book burnings."

          For the long term, I deeply suspect that what we call civilization is really a rather transient period between two stone ages. Our species has been here for 150,000 years and only the last 10,000 in what is called civilization. Even if we manage to maintain civilization a few more centuries that is a blip of time. The duration of our species long into the future could be in the second stone age where it is impossible to build any civilization on a used up world. It make this point in my paper, which discusses the long term prospect for humanity and any intelligent life in the universe. The previous stone age is where the Earth was rich in biodiversity and life. The coming stone age is one where the planet will be depleted, polluted and in a post mass extinction period. Our species is likely engineering the next great mass extinction.

          LC

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          • Post #45

          Dear Jens,

          I very much enjoyed your essay and I agree with the many others who have rated it as clearly one of the best in this contest. It is also one of the few that is highly complementary to our own proposal to focus on producing better minds and thinking. I think we can create the repositories you propose with a goal of not only storing essential knowledge, but to provide the basis for a capability to use the knowledge therein most wisely and efficiently. In other words, intelligently structured knowledge repositories could be created as part of a longer-term implementation of an overall system that would include specially engineered brains and interfaces to efficiently access the knowledge. If disaster struck (and if there are survivors), the latter stages of the project would be delayed, but with your system as an initial investment, the project could be resumed as soon as the enabling technologies allowed survivors to get back on track.

          As an aside, it has been proposed to store information in DNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage) and on discs with a claimed 1000 year lifespan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC), but as your essay recognizes, technology to decode these storage media will have to be bootstrapped from access to other enabling information, allowing the production of the necessary decoding technologies.

          Many thanks for the unique and thoughtful contribution to this contest. I hope your essay does very well.

          All the best,

          Preston Estep (and Alex Hoekstra)