AI & the Diminishing Power of Knowledge and Understanding
Knowledge
Having started to research the origins of the phrase, "knowledge is power", I quickly came across this post on LinkedIn by Stephen Lai back in 2016 where he seems to have done the leg work for me:
The origin of this proverb is often attributed to Francis Bacon in his book Meditationes Sacrae and Human Philosophy written in 1597. However, the origins of the proverb can be traced back almost 1000 years earlier by Imam Ali Bin Abi taleb (600-661), Saying 146 from Nahj Al- Balagha:
Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject.
This means knowledge is the sum of all things, greater than anything physical and nothing great can be achieved without it.
There is a slight challenge to Lai's findings in the comments with a suggestion that the phrase should read, "knowledge itself is power". Either way, I think we get the idea.
I have been thinking about that phrase and how very inaccurate it has, arguably, become in the AC era. Yet, I also wondered why it has stuck around so long. Why was this oft used phrase still used and the power of knowledge seen as severely diminished, given the development of the internet?
It could be argued that as the internet opened up the possibility to eg- learn a new language, access online courses, watch videos on how to do practically anything, accessing books, films, media of any kind, research on a global scale - the potential to access knowledge was suddenly huge. With the development of smart phones and wi-fi, knowledge was also in our hands, literally. Yet, this phrase is still in common use.
According to Lalani, it is a half truth and the application of knowledge is the significant other half which occurs:
by engaging in conversations with one another, networking and connecting, and being engaged in spaces where we can learn more about how people have converted their potential power into influential impact
I quite like that, to be honest and if it is to be concurred with, then perhaps the explanation of the continued use of the "knowledge is power" is that it still holds some truth; it's incomplete as a saying, sort of a half-baked effort to explain something there is agreement on.
However, the reality is that despite the power of the internet and it's reach, navigating, curating and deciphering content are still required 40 years after it's inception. Likewise, there remain issues for some people in having those 'conversations', 'networking' and 'connecting' (as Lalani describes) or indeed finding the spaces, being confident in how to work within those spaces to apply knowledge.
In other words, if knowledge still has a significant degree of power in a post-internet era, then that comes with a need to have a certain set of literacies, skills and understandings. However the past few months have shown that the realities of #ai and in our very brief experiences interacting with #chatbots, a lot of the barriers to knowledge go out of the window.
Working with current #LLM #technology shows us that we no longer need to be able to search or curate content. In addition, and the biggest shift for many of us, we no longer have to decipher content. Much of the difficult demands in distilling, structuring, ensuring the tone and level of the output is matched to the audience, which can be arduous when using the internet, is gone. Hence, I would say that the power of knowing something, of knowledge, has been severely diminished and will continue to further diminish as #ai improves. This viewpoint is reflected so well in the WEF taxonomy
Understanding
Using the DifferenceWiki, and moving on to, what could be argued, is more significant than knowledge....understanding, this is where the lines are not as clear. One view on that wiki is that:
Knowledge is the information that people learn over time and always based on reality and facts. On the other hand, understanding is the learning of meanings of the events based on reality and experience.
Given this explanation and difference between the two, how much does using #ai in the form of a #chatbot for example, to gain knowledge of something, lead to understanding. Well, as already highlighted when talking about knowledge, the AC era has shown us in a very short space of time that we can bespoke tone, form, structure and level of detail/language etc to whatever we require. Surely, that means for the most part, learning of meanings are enabled through some level of reality and experience we have all had already.
Thus, although perhaps not on the scale that knowledge has been diminished, #ai reduces the power of understanding. By having information very easily accessible, 'expert' knowledge on hand, that can be put in a form that enables understanding for the vast majority of people, the next #tech revolution is truly upon us. Knowledge has hardly any power and understanding has much less.
