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Sometimes I think we have created a tyranny of conformity, of a new and altogether different kind to those that have gone before.
Then I saw this quote from the wonderful Peter Ustinov.
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. Peter Ustinov
Or as Bruce Springsteen once put it "57 Channels and nothing on...."
Thanks to Nicholas Carr I found a New York Times article by Kevin Kelly
Its an interesting article. Nicholas Carr has some issues with it. On my first read I think I read it differently. One point caught my eye.
Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.
To take the first point first. How will the availability of documents without historians and scholarship and hard work deepen our grasp of history?
On the second point (Kellys third) how the hell is that going to happen? A degree of authority that is generated by machines, based on what is fed to it by people in the past. How will that generate future authority? I don't get it. Its too much AI (Artificial Intelligence) like, and that hasn't worked too well so far. I still think that its going to take hard work to get to this kind of authority, otherwise it is just superficial stuff. The worst kind of book learning.
No great thing is created suddenly. Epictetus