Jul

28

Take Three Ideas!

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

 

I am sitting here on a deck in Nova Scotia, staring at the deep blue waters in the bay and listening to the lapping of the tide. And I am confused. I try to think of the implications of the digital age in general and the age of AI, as the wave now crashing on the shore of the information world , in particular.

This is really hard. What is happening now is shattering so many preconceptions, and is exhibiting so many differences to the way in witch the digital world subsumed the world of printed content. The result of my reading is that I now have a group of ideas, mutually incompatible, fighting each other in a bag like Kilkenny cats. In today’s blogger’s world, the thing to do is just write them down and let you tell me how to sort these things out. So here is my dilemma:

  1. AI will dis-intermediate the world of the information provider and content creator. The ability of the AI developers to both create fresh content and to synthesise data, combined with the refusal of governments, led by the US government, to protect copyright holders and instead sacrifice them to the economic growth model, points in this duration. I see much in the arguments of Tim O’Reilly about B2B markets, and in a series of articles this month by Ben Kaube  in Scholarly Kitchen and on LinkedIn to support this view. It will happen slowly, and not uniformly, but all the signs are there.
  1. i am beginning to think (some of you will say , not before time!) that we need to pay more attention to the way that user behaviour is changing, and the way we absorb and use information, ideas, knowledge and even wisdom. We pay far more attention to the technology and the business models., In the 45 years which have past since I first walked through the doors of an information industry startup, the changes in user behaviour have been  startling. I have been reading Marianne Wolf‘s latest book. Reader , Come Home. I do not agree with the whole thesis – the idea that the next generations never do things as well or the way that we did is somewhat tiresome – but there are real truths here. We are increasingly intolerant of longform (witness my own publisher and readers on the subject of length – whether we are discussing the books, the paragraphs or even the words!) Of course the smartphone has changed the way which we communicate. I still believe that we are a narrative driven animal, however, and communication patterns can rotate as well as change – the first English novels, like Samuel Richardson‘s Clarissa, were after all narratives documented in exchanges of letters.
  1. As a result of various discussions this month , I was brought back to Walter Ong. I remember being very impressed years ago by his arguments about the development from what he called a world governed by orality to a world of literacy. I have put an AI summary of the distinction that he makes at the foot of this note. Perhaps I have been too much influenced by what has happened in my own life, but I think that we are turning once again towards a voice-moderated society. Since I was registered blind two years ago, I have tracked with interest my ability to substitute voice for eyesight in a society that seems to have been doing somewhat the same. I have been known to describe the keyboard as the longest cul-de-sac in the history of civilisation! But if we are returning to a world where oracy is the more dominant force, then do all the changes in consciousness that Ong noted go into reverse? What has to happen to memory, comprehension, and precision of expression to name but three facets of communication to enable us to work with equal facility in either form of expression.?

Walter Ong died in 2003 and was more concerned, as a Jesuit, with the theological implications of these ideas than I am. Yet by defining writing as a technology, and by introducing the idea of secondary orality to account for the influence of radio, telephone and television in his lifetime, I feel that he points us towards taking the shift to a further advancement of voice in a smartphone based, AI moderated world very seriously indeed. The knowledge workers of today have been brought up to think and rationalise through writing. How will this change and what will be the effect of those changes on the way in which our information systems work?

In 1980, I became CEO of EUROLEX, the first UK legal information retrieval service. I wonder, as I gaze out at the bay, what I would need to do to make such a service competitive today. Comprehensiveness in data terms is a given. Superb AI capability that fully understands the legal context is a must. But I think that to maintain competitive strength I would want to add two other elements. I would want my AI to have a voice based prompt engineering component. In other words, I would want my users to be able to discuss their questions in detail before finalising them, getting critical feedback on phrasing and coverage before posing the question, and providing for reiteration and refinement to encourage the idea that a range of answers is better than a “solution“. And I wiould create publicise a panel of leading legal experts and jurists employed to provide alternative judgements and interpretations of the law. I would argue that these, when added to the model, gave additional reach and value, but they would not be available publicly outside of the service. In an age when all the data is held by everybody, then the things that machine intelligence finds most difficult – total originality, eccentricity, illogical reasoning with an acceptable result – these may have a premium. And all the while I would try to study the behaviour of my users minutely. My ability to stay ahead would depend entirely on how close I modelled the way they communicated.

but just now it is a whole lot easier to watch the seabirds circling across the bay!