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This article, which appeared in the magazine
Information Strategy, is a reworking of my earlier article
'Intelligence: Logical or Biological' that appeared in the
CACM.
See previous.
The KNOWLEDGE SCAM
Through
automation, capital has vanquished organized labour; increasingly it is
destroying (re-engineering) service and office jobs. It was inevitable
that the owners of company equity would try to automate intellectual
labour, and so avoid the indignity of having to make excessive payments to
mercenary knowledge workers, those talented individuals whose innovative
skills ultimately create the profits of their companies. Naturally,
capital is looking to computerization in its battle to de-skill intellect,
but in doing so it will find itself sucked into the myth of synthesized
knowledge, the 'knowledge scam.'
Ironically,
within this myth computing has reached the limits of its applicability.
Computing, the high point of the machine age, the ultimate automating
technology and the destroyer of all jobs requiring physical strength, is
fundamentally flawed. Paradoxically applied computing is totally dependent
on intellectual labour. Information and knowledge, the sole prerogatives
of the knowledge worker, are the keys.
Many
of the developers of so-called 'intelligent systems' have not yet
grasped this reality. They see themselves at the forefront of the new
technology that is spawning 'Cyberspace,' and yet they are drenched in
the mind-set and ritual of the defunct machine age. Theirs is an arrogance
that persists in spreading the malignant lie, that knowledge and
intelligence can be disembodied, discerned through the application of
logic and mathematical models, and finally automated. Bunkum! This is just
the latest in a long line of nonsense, of 'knowledge engineering,' 'data mining' and
'inference engines,' that has been inflicted on
a world made gullible through ritualized technology. Mega-millions of
dollars have been wasted in the 'knowledge scam,' the futile quest to
categorize common sense knowledge and basic human intelligence in this
daft way. Thankfully it will soon be dumped in the garbage bin of
technological history.
The
technophiles and much of their technocracy, riddled as it is with machine
age bigotries, will also be swept aside. Technology supremacists are
merely the 'navvies' building the superhighway and the 'grease-monkeys' servicing the vehicles that travel along it. They
fail to see that intelligence is not a drab and inert collection of 'if-then-else rules' and
'structured queries' traversing
synthesized knowledge stored in tree structures. The Tree of Knowledge is
not a data structure! Such 'bubbleware,' of circles and arrowed lines
pretending to give meaning to the words scribbled alongside, is about to
burst.
These
technophiles hold the very peculiar beliefs that the mind is a machine,
and that rigidly mechanistic and logical thought is virtuous. They are
irritated by human failings that squander the true and wonderful
enlightenment of logic. Proselytes know that these failings can only be
righted by the creation an intelligent machine, a machine untouched by
Original Sin. Heaven on Earth is possible, but only by imposing a
synthetic intelligence on humanity, an intelligence disembodied and then
automated.
These
technophiles refuse to accept that humanity has become successful despite
this rigid way of thinking, not because of it. Success can be achieved
through transcending logic - only the drab obey logic without question.
There are occasions when it is intelligent to be illogical - to act, to
react instinctively. "The music is not in the notes" (Charles Ives);
it is in the musician. Intelligence is not in the machine.
It is in the head of the symbolic analyst. Knowledge is not in the
data, it is in our awareness of that data. Intelligence is our ability to
recognize the significance in what we know, and to understand, reason and
learn to adapt to, and profit from, new situations.
Intelligence and
knowledge are not something that can be tuned into. Linked inextricably,
they are our inheritance from distant ancestors, even from those amoebae
in the primaeval slime. They are the contrived and coarse systematization
of sense data and biochemical input that enable us to make our way in a
hostile world. They are
highly personal. Intelligence dictates on our observations so that we can
interpret and make sense of them, and the emergent knowledge feeds back to
reinforce and hopefully enhance intelligence. This feedback loop is
entangled, not only in the uniqueness of each individual's experience,
but also in an evolutionary spiral, genetically restricted and limited by "the curriculum of an earlier
mankind"
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Did those amoebae know the truth about things? Of course not! Nor does
humanity. There was no magic moment when, on the path of human evolution,
our progenitors were given the keys to the kingdom of knowledge.
Intelligence has not been perfected into some 'state of grace.' It is
the result of feedback and the totality of effects, the choices made by,
and the constraints imposed on, individual experience and on our
ancestors' in humanity's quest for survival at every stage of
development. Our means of thought was never its original function.
Intelligence and knowledge are mere side-effects of survival and the way
we deal with our environment. "Only
very naive people are capable of believing that the nature of man could be
transformed into a purely logical one."
"The world is logical because we made it logical." We made it
logical in the eons of feedback that is life on earth. It is sobering to
consider that we share a common ancestry of interpretation with that
single cell! That human evolution has spawned logic, mathematics and
technology from this base, does not mean that we can control the "flux of becoming" within reality, any more than the amoebae can.
We
are trapped in our mode of thinking; forced to build within a framework of
cyphers that is knowledge, a cage set down before the dawn of
intelligence. "Just as certain
human organs recall the stage of evolution of the fish, so there must also
be in our brain grooves and convolutions that correspond to that cast of
mind: but these grooves and convolutions are no longer the riverbed along
which the stream of our sensibility runs." We have merely developed
upon the fishes' eye view of the world, and cultivated a more
sophisticated schema. Darwin and his contemporaries were only too aware
that his evolution theories held this nihilistic message. They knew that
the real argument was far more profound than the sideshow of our descent
from the apes. They knew that evolution held a reductio
ad absurdum rejection of any formal understanding of intelligence. Why
has our own age forgotten this? Perhaps it is appropriate that we choose
not to know that there is no knowing about knowing? "How
should a tool (our intellect) be able to criticize itself when it has only
itself for the critique";
"how
can we look around our own corner?"
Logic
is a fiction of intellect; it is a systematization of cyphers that
prejudices us in the belief that our sensations show us the truth about
things, about reality. But delusion can be effective nonetheless. Those
amoebae developed reactive interpretations of their environment, enabling
them to survive and prosper. Humanity also. At each stage in the feedback
of our development a logic was formed that was sufficient for the
effective interpretation of sense data. "Not
to know but to schematize - to impose upon chaos as much regularity and
form as our practical needs require." Our cyphers describe things,
and describe them well. They describe and designate in a way that is
useful. The human brain
created logic because it was useful, not because it was true - despite
the theory, and not because of it. But although useful, "what
convinces is not necessarily true, it is merely convincing." What
convinced us there and then, need not convince us here and now, everywhere
and everywhen.
It
is not necessary to convince ourselves of the universal validity of logic
merely in order to apply it appropriately. "Logic
was intended as facilitation; as a means of expression and not as truth;
only later did it acquire the effect of truth."
"Our intellect is a consequence of the conditions of existence," a
culmination of feedback in this species' successful (to date) quest for
survival. Human intelligence is tied to life; then it is biological,
genealogical rather than logical. Then human intelligence cannot be
separated from what is the human total. Logic is a product of
intelligence, but the perverted causality of machine age thinking would
have us believe that intelligence is a product of logic. 'True' and 'false' are merely artificial concepts born in a successful feedback,
themselves sometime-appropriate misinterpretations. Logic contrives to
make simple, to make consistent, that which is not.
The
methods of this science (or rather this pseudo-science) so prevalent
nowadays, and spouted by a 'management culture,' are not going to help
us walk the tightrope stretched above the abyss that is the future. Many
of our rituals have evolved to be optimal in the Machine Age, but will
they help us cope in the Information Age? Our overuse of measurement in 'knowledge management' is just misplaced ritual, as is
computerization, as is 'auditing' (mere output measurement), as is
command and control systems: all 'rain-dances,' pretences that we
understand our world and are in control of it. Methods are magic wands
pretending to keep everything ordered and tidy by banishing all the 'evil spirits' to limbo.
"If it can't be measured, it doesn't
exist" (Lord Acton).
The
most important things in life, in business, can't be measured, and what
is being measured is often irrelevant - the only reason it is being
measured at all is because it can be measured, and only ritual makes that
important. We possess merely "a
convincing criterion of reality in order to misunderstand reality in a
shrewd and advantageous manner." The concept of comparison that
pervades all such thinking is fundamentally flawed. "Error
is a condition of observation in general." "The
presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is
identical at different points of time," the idea of 'sameness,'
the seed of equality and enumeration, and thus of logic, was merely appropriate
in our evolution. We are trapped in that evolution. We must accept 'sameness,' and hence
'number,' as a practical choice with
circumscribed appropriateness, while at the same time denying its
validity. This is only a problem to those who insist on the logic of 'false opposites,' grounded in sameness. The logic of mathematics is
just idiosyncrasy, mere self-indulgent over-sophistication. Mathematics is
not universally appropriate. Was it ever? And the 'knowledge scam,'
the bastard child of logic, the last bastion against the economic
mercenary, is error compounded on error.
Just
get on with it, and refuse to play by the rules of the logicians. Be
confident in your own individual self-decided designations of appropriate
and inappropriate. Accepting complexities and ambiguities in the unknown
and unknowable is what successful 'humans' do all the time. Ambiguity
is only a problem when we think about it within the cage of logic; only
then does ambiguity make us rigid and we cease to function. But life is on
'the edge of chaos,' and so ambiguity is part of life. The people who
need certainties, do so because they have no joy in life.
Successful
individuals are supremely confident in their scarcity value; there will be
no automation of their intellect; no short cut to their skills. They know
about people, they know about manipulating people, which is far more
important than knowing about technology. Their cynical stance will make
them invincible in their conquest of cyberspace. To them, a cyberspace is
not an off-planet experience, it is merely the delivery mechanism for
cyphers, cyphers that will be used to add value to every business deal.
The high-tech medium has only changed the form and scale of that delivery,
albeit differently and better. Technophiles claim to see these cyphers
floating around in a cyberspace, but there is no world of cyphers out
there; the information content of cyphers does not exist in some mystical
dimension, some cyberspace. Information is the same as it always has been,
something reserved for the planet-bound human brain, to communicate
between people within human society.
Still
very much down to earth, cyphers are "Human
all to Human," abstractions in a 'cypherspace' rather than 'cyberspace.' This is the same
'cypherspace' that humanity has
always inhabited, only now the technophiles have inadvertently given the
innovative knowledge worker the means to travel around it at warp speed.
They see through the 'knowledge scam.' The battle for cyberspace is
all over bar the shouting.
[1] the italicized quotations in this essay are taken from translations by
W. Kaufmann and by R.J. Hollingdale of the works of Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900).
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