All Annotations of When Answers Are Cheap - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium[Preview]

saved byeyal matsliah on 2007-12-07

• Nowhere is the tendency to reduce the world to foundational bits (bits as in ghostly bodiless information) more prevalent than in the realm of digital technology. The view of the reduced bit is a common viewpoint of contemporary futurists who see the world, past, present and to come, in terms of information. It is my viewpoint, and the perspective of my own writing.
• "Most things that are experienced - this very moment, for instance, or your entire life - are far more likely to be Mind's musings than the physical processes they seem to be." (Robot, p.168)
• Reductionism gives you answers, while holism gives you questions. No one said this better than Picasso, who is reputed to have claimed, "The trouble with computers is that all they give you is answers." Exactly. If you want answers, you become an expert reductionist. If you want questions, however, you exercise your qualitative holistic mind, as an artist would.
• As we have gotten really good in the reduction mode, making lots of computers, lots of knowledge, answers are becoming cheap. In fact someday answers (correct answers!) will be so cheap that the really valuable things will be questions. A really good question will be worth a thousand correct answers. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean that in the marketplace. Good questions will cost more than good answers.
• If we had to point out where the future is erupting into the present, most of us would say that a peephole into what is next can be found in Google. Google is the world’s brain. It is the product of reduction technology and what it provides most of all is answers.
• So I envision a question economy, running on a plentitude of answers. Most of these answers are generated darwinianly. Algorithms that produce answers score well in fitness criteria, and are then rewarded with more questions, and so on. Answers are made by robots, which leaves questions to be made by humans. Picasso would be happy here. In a perfect search world, humans will be paid to ask questions.
• Science, in fact, will come to be measured as the expansion of our ignorance, rather than an expansion of our knowledge.
• But in fact the mark of wisdom is that it embraces ignorance wrapped in answers. I believe a perfect search world will produce the first glimmers of global wisdom.
• I don't envision a world where answers stop coming, or reductionism diminishes. I *can* envision a world where questions become more strategic, more valuable than answers, and where therefore the ability to think in a different way, to dwell on and in qualities, to conjure up relations that supercede the parts, to grok the wholeness of things, and to inquire about meaning rather than function -- I can imagine a world where this would be very valuable -- for itself and as a way to keep the answers coming!