Have you taken medication recently? Stayed in an air-conditioned hotel room? Used a refrigerator? Accessed the Internet? Played games on your smartphone? Driven in a car?
Almost everything in today's world is powered by knowledge -- the result of thousands of years of accumulated investigation and discovery. As I've suggested, knowledge includes art, music, technical manuals, scientific publications and so on. It's the sum total of all information humanity has externalized (i.e., recorded in some medium) and then chosen to maintain over time. Under this definition, a conversation I had years ago but didn't record is not knowledge. However, if I write down an insight from that conversation and put it on my blog, I've created knowledge. The former really isn't accessible to anyone who wasn't there. The latter is. Likewise, the DNA we carry in our cells isn't knowledge by this definition, whereas a sequenced and recorded genome is. Every person's specific DNA sequence is ephemeral and disappears with our bodies. The latter can be maintained over time. A recorded sequence that turns out to be highly medically relevant will probably not be forgotten as long as humanity is around.
Like biological evolution, knowledge as I define it is subject to an ongoing process of selection and reproduction. Some knowledge is revised over time, some possibly lost altogether, some supplemented by new knowledge, some interpreted in new ways, and so on. We can find plenty of instances of scientific knowledge that started out as “true” only to turn out “false” as we learned more, and vice versa. Similarly we can find many instances of artworks that were considered important at one point only to be forgotten later. As with biological evolution, my definition of knowledge focuses on the cumulative effects of the process of transformation over time. And that effect is extraordinarily powerful.
Consider for a moment what knowledge might allow humanity to do in the future. We might through further discovery rid ourselves of fossil fuels, cure any disease, take care of every human's basic needs, and travel to other planets in our solar system and beyond. (We could of course also blow our own planet to bits before any of that can happen. I'll talk more about this in a little while). Now, you might say: “Travel to the stars? That's impossible.” Actually, it isn't. Extremely difficult? Yes. Requiring technology that doesn't yet exist? Yes. But impossible? No. Interstellar travel might not be imminent, but with the further accretion of knowledge, it will become possible.
Look at many of the things around you. How might a smartphone have seemed to someone just one hundred years ago? How might a car or an airplane have seemed to someone a thousand years ago? As the British science fiction writer Arthur Clarke once remarked, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Whatever it might accomplish and wherever it might lead, knowledge is the essential human project. We are the only species on planet earth that has created knowledge. This is also why I include art in my definition of knowledge. Art has allowed humans to express our hopes and fears and its accretion into culture has allowed the large scale coordination and mobilization of human effort.
When thinking about the power of knowledge, we must remember that a year or a decade or even a hundred years are all trivial in the time scale of humanity, and in turn humanity's time scale is trivial compared to that of the universe. In light of this, it makes most sense to regard as possible all speculative propositions that don't explicitly contravene the laws of physics—a line of thinking inspired by a new theoretical foundation for science called Constructor Theory.
What knowledge has already made possible today, by virtue of the industrial revolution and the rise of digital technology, is a society that can take care of everyone's basic needs and allow us all to contribute to knowledge. Just like the Job Loop powered industrial society, so the knowledge society will be a different process, the Knowledge Loop. Under the Knowledge Loop, someone starts out by learning something, then uses that to create something new, which is then shared.
[Image of Knowledge Loop]
The Knowledge Loop is not, strictly speaking, new. Rather, it has been around for almost as long as humanity itself. At several points in our history, however, we have seen critical breakthroughs that have made the knowledge loop run faster and more expansively. The first was spoken language. Then came written language. Then came printing. Then we got telecommunications and radio and TV. Along the way we invented the scientific method, which has given us much of our technological progress. But now we are witnessing another fundamental breakthrough: digital technologies, including a network that connects all of humanity.
It is easy to underestimate the importance of digital technology and a global network; to many, it seems as if these innovations have under-delivered. As a line on the Founders Fund website once complained, “We wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.” Actually, that's not all we have gotten, nor is it even the slightest fraction of what we will get. New sources of energy, new cures for diseases, faster modes of transportation, more capable robots, and so on all originate in the knowledge loop. Given how profoundly digital technology accelerates and expands the knowledge loop, we must recognize that we stand today on the cusp of amazing new possibilities.
In recent years, we've seen the first glimmerings of what we might call the Digital Knowledge Loop. Let's reflect on a few examples. Youtube has experienced astounding growth since its release in beta form in 2005. Today users around the world upload over 100 hours of video content to Youtube every minute. It is difficult to grasp how much knowledge that is. If you were to spend 100 years watching Youtube twenty- four hours a day, you still wouldn't be able to watch all the video that people upload in the course of a single week.
Now, you might say, “That video isn't knowledge. It's mostly junk!” But keep in mind, knowledge as I'm talking about it is not (or should not be) subject to judgment. We don't know yet which parts of Youtube's content will wind up being maintained over time. And in fact, we are already seeing amazing things happening on Youtube. Suppose you want to learn how to garden? Well ... <> Not only that but there are now also videos telling you how to record your own gardening videos. <>
Now if you don't garden or aren't interested in it this may strike you as an odd example. But you can find videos on virtually any skill on Youtube <>. And skills aren't the only interesting things you can learn on Youtube. You can also learn languages, math, science, and so on. <<Smarter Everyday example here (leave Patreon out for the moment + would be great to figure out where Dustin is learning the things he is putting into his videos)>>
Here is the most important part: All of these videos are available for free to anyone in the world (Well, almost anyone. Youtube is banned in some countries). They are also available 24x7. And they become available globally the second someone publishes a new one. All you need to access these videos is an Internet connection and a smartphone—you don't even need a laptop or other traditional computer.
Many of the videos available on Youtube exemplify the digital knowledge loop at work. Let's say someone has learned something, such as how to play a chord on the guitar. They then create something—a song that includes that chord. Finally they share that song by recording themselves performing it and publishing it on Youtube. Instantly, that performance becomes knowledge from which anyone else, anywhere in the world, at any time can learn. And as others learn and share, the Knowledge Loop continues.
Wikipedia also gives rise to a digital version of the Knowledge Loop. Someone reads an entry in this free, comprehensive encyclopedia and learns something from it (e.g., the method used by Pythagors to approximate the number pi). They then go off and create something (e.g., an animation that illustrates this method). Finally, they share it by publishing it back to the encylopedia or elsewhere on the Internet for that matter. Now, Wikipedia differs from Youtube in some critically important ways. Instead of presenting a set of disconnected videos or videos that at best are connected by either human curated playlists or computer generated suggestions, Wikipedia presents entries that stem from a large collaboration and ongoing revision process, with only a single entry per topic visible at any given time (although you can examine both the history of the page and the conversations about it). What makes this possible is a piece of software known as a wiki that keeps track of all the historical edits.
Wikipedia also differs from Youtube in that it allows individuals to participate in extremely small or minor ways. If you wish, you can contribute to Wikipedia by fixing a single typo. In fact, the minimal contribution unit is just one letter! I have not yet contributed anything of length to Wikipedia, but I have fixed probably a dozen or so typos. That doesn't sound like much, but if you get ten thousand people to fix a typo every day, that's 3.65 million typos a year. Let's assume that a single person takes two minutes on average to discover and fix a typo. It would take nearly fifty people working full time for a year (2500 hours) to fix 3.65 million typos. You can now appreciate how much more quickly knowledge can take root and grow with many contributors making small contributions.
While Wikipedia allows for minimal contributions, other digital platforms allow people to contribute to the Knowledge Loop by doing absolutely nothing. The app Waze is a good example. You install the app on your phone (okay, that's one thing you do have to do). The app then tracks if you seem to be in a car, and if that car is moving fast or slow. It passes that information back to Waze's servers, and the company's algorithms crunch it to figure out where traffic is moving smoothly and where drivers will encounter slowdowns or outright traffic jams. During your commute into work, you might use Waze to learn where traffic is moving quickly and where it is congested. Or if you happen to find yourself at a location where traffic is congested, the data you contribute allows the system to understand the cause of the congestion and pass that along to other drivers (the “create” and “share” parts of the Knowledge Loop). If you choose to take a different route, you again automatically share your speed on that potential detour with other users of the system.
Let's recap: When your marginal cost was extremely high, you had no customers. As your marginal cost dropped you started to be able to sell. And as your marginal cost approached zero, you eventually started to feed the world! This is exactly where we are with digital technology and the knowledge loop. We can now feed the world. That additional Youtube video view? Marginal cost of zero. Additional access to Wikipedia? Marginal cost of zero. Additional traffic report delivered by Waze? Marginal cost of zero. This means that we should expect certain digital “pizza-making operations” to be huge and span the globe in near monopoly positions (i.e., they are much larger than anyone else, having nearly the entire market to themselves). But (and this is critical to the idea of a knowledge society) it also means from a social perspective that everyone in the world should have access to these systems.
Why prevent someone from accessing Youtube, Wikipedia or Waze, either by cutting them off from the system altogether or charging a price they can't afford? This would always constitute a loss to society. With the marginal cost at or near zero, any given individual might receive some benefit, which comprises a benefit greater than the marginal cost. And best of all, they might use what they learn to create something that they share and that in turn winds up delivering extraordinary enjoyment or a scientific breakthrough to the world.
<> If the knowledge loop combined with digital technologies is so powerful, why do we need to work at becoming a knowledge society? Why not just keep government out of the way and let entrepreneurs and markets take care of everything from here on out? Because we are living with older structures that are the legacy of over a century of industrial society. We have based our economies around the Job Loop, which is currently breaking down. We have based our laws about information access on locking up information and selling it like industrial products. And we have developed a culture that supports our participation in the industrial economy, both as producers (workers) and consumers. Both collectively and individually, we have adopted a range of assumptions and beliefs that enable us to structure our lives around our jobs and to fuel the economy through consumption. To participate fully in a knowledge society, we will have to free ourselves psychologically, re-thinking our behavior as consumers and embracing new assumptions and beliefs that enable us to learn, create, and share knowledge.
If we want to truly unleash the knowledge loop, if we want to make it central to our lives, if we want to reap its benefits and limit its downsides, then we need to make major changes both collectively and individually. In particular we will need to ensure three types of freedom:
- Economic freedom. We must let everyone meet their basic needs without having to hold a job. This way, we can double down on automation and enable everyone to participate in the knowledge loop.
- Informational freedom We must remove boundaries to learning knowledge, creating new knowledge based on that and sharing this new knowledge.
- Psychological freedom. We must free ourselves from scarcity thinking and its associated fears that impede our participation in the knowledge loop.
Each of these freedoms and the associated policies and individual changes will be discussed in more detail Part Three.