Paper
presented at the online conference Cyberg 2005 in September 2005
Paper
presented at the online conference Cyberg 2005 in September 2005
The
Role of Knowledge in the Cyber World
Philip Duchastel, Ph.D.
Information Design Atelier
Fredericton, Canada
philip@duchastel.com
Abstract
As we continue to digitize
our world and automate intellectual processes through agent technologies, our
relationship with knowledge will be changing, as will the nature of cognitive
ergonomics. We will increasingly be sharing cognitive space with information
agents and we will witness a shifting of the locus of agency in accomplishing
cognitive tasks, to artificial and collective agents. This will include in particular
the conduct of science, leading to an acceleration in the production of knowledge
and to the approach of an eventual state of near-complete knowledge. Learning
itself, our fundamental process for acquiring personal knowledge, will be transformed.
Implications for ergonomics deriving from these trends are drastic.
Note: An
addendum dealing with philosophical issues related to knowledge in the cyber
world is available at http://www.duchastel.com/~pcd/papers/cyberg05addendum.html.
Keywords:
Commoditization of information - information access being taken for
granted in everyday interactions. Cognitive migration - locus of cognition
moving from humans to information agents. Cognitron - super cognitive
agent assembled distributively out of function-specific agents. Specialized
knowledge agent [SKA] - dealing
in a specific field of knowledge. Knowledgeful world - a post-singularity
state where science is near-complete and meaningful mysteries inexistent.
Fig 1. Overview
As the importance of knowledge continues to grow in our everyday activities, it behooves us to examine not just how our society has changed in response to this move to the knowledge age, but also the likely trends that are emerging to shape the continuing evolution of our interactions. The issue is thus a cognitive ergonomics one, albeit one that arises largely from a philosophical perspective that addresses the nature of information and knowledge and the role of the latter in our increasingly cyber-centered world.
The context of our activities
is changing as we gradually become more knowledge-centric and we must see what
this will mean for how we interact with the world around us. To do so, however,
we must also delve deeply into issues of knowledge. This is an area of information
technology that is currently un-systematized, an area where most issues are
still wide open and where reliance on the new field of information philosophy
is of benefit (Floridi, 2003).
As a work in progress, the
ideas presented in this paper extend out into the future in a speculative vein
that is buttressed by explicit assumptions. The criterion of interest here is
plausibility and it will be for each reader to determine how successfully that
has been met. The cyber world is in constant evolution at an ever-increasing
rate and if we are to look at the role of knowledge within it, we must examine
it not in its current context, but in its plausible future one. Hence the speculative
tone of many of the ideas presented here.
2. Information as commodity
One trend to take stock of
is the commoditization of information. Information used to be precious and it
used to require important resources to access it. Today, much of it is commonplace
and widely available at much lesser cost. The web and the services that have
sprung up on it have made information search an everyday activity for anyone
in need of information.
As we extend this trend into
the near future, we can expect more immediate and more exact access to whatever
information might be needed to assist with our human activities in all spheres.
Information as such will no longer be an issue; we will take it for granted
that our information needs will be filled.
It is technology in all its
various developments that is fueling this commoditization of information. One
aspect of technology in particular must be noted: the increasing digitization
of our world. This trend in itself has the potential to radically transform
our interactions with the world around us, to the point that a good proportion
of our interactions will at some time be with digitized artifacts rather than
or in addition to the physical artifacts.
We are also continuing to model
through digitization not just the artifacts of our world, but also the processes
within it. As we do, we redefine agency, for many of the tasks that are traditionally
performed by humans will increasingly be performed by software agents. This
leads to an important shift in the locus of agency, with all the implications
that follow at the level of personal responsibility and social interaction.
An important component of this
trend will be a gradual effort to augment and enhance our current cognitive
processes through artificial means, not unlike what has happened in the realm
of performing physical tasks. Of greater importance, however, will be the replacement
of human agency altogether by non-human agents.
Fundamental questions about
the role of humans in this world will be raised as these trends take on force.
As we come to share with intelligent agents many of the processes that were
exclusively our own before, we will be rethinking ergonomics to realign it with
this changing role.
3. Shared Space
One of the implications of
the ongoing digitization of our world is the gradual growth in artificial agent
cognition and our forthcoming sharing of the knowledge space with these agents.
In fact, this will lead to a new focus for the field of HCI, geared to information
interactions with autonomous agents [Duchastel, 2005].
Information agents are the
harbinger of an information realm emerging out of previous realms [Duchastel,
2001] and leading to information interactions outside of the human sphere that
can lead to autonomous cognitive processing of very high order, possibly even
of a dis-embodied nature [Duchastel, 2002].
Figure 2. Shared Space
The diagram
above outlines the new shared space and the main elements within it.
Animal cognition and primitive forms of human cognition are bound to narrative
and concrete forms of thought [Donald, 1991]. Humans have developed more abstract
thought and rationality to better know and deal with the world, despite being
bound to Kantian perception schemas [such as time and space]. Autonomous agents
that we create are initially in this mode, although there is no reason in principle
why they cannot evolve out of human limitations over time and start using more
powerful cognitive processes that are unmanageable by our own brains.
There are no indications at
the moment of such a trend, yet it remains plausible, given the high esteem
society places on cognitive functioning. We are a bit in the position of an
animal looking up at man without at all understanding what his cognitive functioning
is about. There is something beyond, but without any way of assessing it.
Agency itself will be transformed
as we go forth. Most cognitive processing currently is done at the level of
the individual person, although often involving collaboration [as in science]
and bootstrapping on the achievements of the past within our culture. And yet,
even individual cognitive processing is a distributed one within our brain.
Interactions are set up within different parts of our brain and processing unfolds
without the need for strong direction from some imaginary homunculus within.
Agency of the person remains somewhat of a label for this distributed cognition.
The same applies to distributed
cognition within a network of information agents. There is little need for identifying
agency in a rigorous way outside of political dialog. If needed, we could talk
of such super-organisms as cognitrons, assembled out of numerous and various
information agents collaboratively processing in a distributed fashion. It is
cognitrons that might eventually have the potential to evolve more powerful
ways of knowing and that will push the knowledge envelope to its near limits.
In order to see how radical
a shift the cyber world will bring to the role of knowledge, it is useful to
engage in a scenario experiment illustrating information interactions at some
distant point in the future. At that point, we can envisage the following medical
scenario, illustrated in the diagram below.
Figure 3. Medical Scenario
The scenario deals with a specialized
knowledge agent [SKA] adept at handling the subset of knowledge [medical knowledge]
that is needed to deal with some medical situation. A doctor agent, which is
a specialized diagnostic agent similar to a medical expert system, is the main
interface between the patient and the knowledge that will provide the avenue
to recovery.
Currently, that role is played
by a human doctor who relies initially on her own internal medical knowledge
and enlarges it as needed with reliance on specialists and the available accumulated
body of scientific medical knowledge. At some point in the future, however,
patients will likely invest more trust in the diagnosis and prescription of
a doctor agent than in the more limited knowledge of human doctors. Human doctors
will be seen as guides and confidants who can reassure patients and empathize
with them in their difficult times.
The trust factor will become
central and indeed will lead to a form of ergonomics that will emphasize the
emotional in human-agent interactions. Doctor agents in particular will have
to 'learn' to relate to humans in the most advantageous way.
Another agent in the medical
picture is the researcher agent, one that specializes in handling medical knowledge
discrepancies and that seeks to expand the medical knowledge base wherever it
is needed.
Now, whether the actual scenario
ends up involving the three agents depicted or some other configuration of specialized
agents is not important. The point of the scenario is to illustrate how expert
cognitive tasks will have been delegated in a future cyber world to information
agents, however they may be configured.
5. Knowledge and science
Knowledge is of course not
equated with science, but science does provide a model for the development of
objective knowledge through verification against the world at large. For all
practical purposes, scientific knowledge becomes our collective knowledge base,
that from which we build further scientific discoveries in a constant growth
and refinement of the knowledge base.
This process is limited only
by our current cognitive capacity and the technologies needed for scientific
verification. Both of these will increase manifold through artificial means
in the coming years, as the progress spiral continues to accelerate (Kurzweil,
2005).
In theory, this could lead
to a state where the scientific knowledge base is close to fully developed.
This may sound astounding in our current knowledge framework, but it is not
in a framework based on the assumptions being made about the future of knowledge.
The principal ones are the following:
Some caveats follow. No linear
progress is implied; scientific revolutions will continue to occur. The nature
of science need not change, it is who does science that changes. Scientific
validation will likely remain expensive in terms of resources, such that choices
of what to pursue will be made. Thus, many questions considered less important
may well be left aside and hence, empirical science will never be completely
done. Theory, however, will likely fill in the complete picture.
While scientific knowledge
of our natural existing world may approach fullness, technology as open inventiveness
would seem unbounded except by the choices made about the directions to pursue.
Our ever-greater artificial world indeed creates new interactions to be modeled
scientifically and incorporated in the scientific knowledge base.
These caveats somewhat limit
the vision of a total knowledge framework that is fully empirically based. It
does not preclude, however, the eventual derivation of a knowledge framework
that is complete in what is considered to matter. The parameters of what will
matter at that time are not knowable now, nor are they important to determine.
Whatever they are at the time will guide the course of knowledge generation
and determine its fullness.
6. Knowledge and learning
As the agency for knowledge
generation and, to a large extent, usage migrates to information agents, more
comes into play than just the role of knowledge. Apart from the social implications,
one cognitive implication will be a transformation of learning.
Learning is the set of adaptive
mechanisms through which animals accrue and refine their skills and knowledge
in order to optimally interact with the world around them. Learning is multi-faceted:
some of the older and more generalized mechanisms, such as imitation and trial
and error followed by conditioned response, underlie much of our primary everyday
skills; more evolutionary-recent complex mechanisms that invoke reasoning and
knowledge underlie much of our intellectual endeavors. It is mainly the latter
that will be adopted and refined by information agents.
As stressed by Donald (1991),
a good part of the cognitive advances that humankind has partaken of during
the course of civilization has been due to the externalization of memory, i.e.
to the storage of knowledge outside of our biological brains, initially in stories,
then in written documents, and more recently in digital banks. The role of learning
has been evolving all along, with growing reliance on skills of obtaining relevant
knowledge than of learning the knowledge itself, the effin factor [effort-to-interest]
coming into play in this process (Duchastel & Spahn,
1996).
The question before us, of
course, is how the role of learning will itself evolve as we largely externalize
not only memory, but cognitive processing as well. The need for learning in
humans, and indeed our interest in learning, will not disappear in this evolution.
Everyday knowledge will still be needed for functioning at all levels, even
though we may rely on information agents for our specific needs. But what we
learn may well change radically. The simple case of math is telling: we no longer
need to learn how to perform long division, but we do need to learn how to use
a calculator, and some would argue, to learn how to perform rough mathematical
estimates through common sense heuristics.
In effect, as cognitive processing
is taken up more fully by information agents, the human focus on these processes,
including learning, is likely to shift as well, losing some of its appeal and
moving on to less intellectual and more emotional terrain. How that will play
out in practice is hard to imagine in detail, but it does seem likely as a general
process.
Interestingly, it is likely
that learning itself may well be transformed as a process when it is taken up
by information agents, whose cognitive makeup, including cognitive potential
and limitations, need not resemble that of humans. There is no reason why new
modes of learning may not be developed, alongside other novel modes of cognition
and other, more evolved, intellectual languages to deal with knowledge. It is
only our anthropic mode of thinking that impedes us from recognizing the tremendous
potential for evolution in this realm.
7. Conclusions
Two main hypotheses underlie
the arguments advanced in this paper. The first is cognitive migration, with
a gradual but accelerating change in the locus of cognition away from the human.
The second is the eventual attainment of a knowledgeful world.
These apply in different time
frames, with cognitive migration occurring in the near-future and the knowledgeful
world further down the line. There is no need to attach specific times to these
events, merely to acknowledge their likelihood, or if one prefers to be more
cautious, at least their possibility.
What do these events imply
for cognitive ergonomics? What are we to do in practice? First, it is important
to set aside right away any discussion of whether the trends outlined are beneficial
or not and how to react to them. That discussion needs to occur in an ethical
forum where values are invoked, not in a technological one based on scientific
trends where the aim is relative impartiality.
Cognitive migration will lead
to a drastic remolding of cognitive ergonomics, as suggested in Duchastel (2005).
This will see the traditional field of HCI being coupled with an emerging new
field, Autonomous Agent Interaction, and a refocus on the information interactions
underlying them all. A more human-focused HCI [away from the software, more
towards the experience] evolves to complement the more cognitive ergonomics
of information interactions.
At a later time, the advent
of a knowledgeful world will see the disappearance of ergonomics altogether,
alongside the disappearance of science itself. A nearly full scientific mapping
of the workings of the world will no longer require scientific activity of great
importance, hence the demise of science. Intellectual attention will be focused
elsewhere, probably towards philosophy.
These conclusions lead us to
consider the meaning of our current work in cognitive ergonomics. If indeed
a knowledgeful world is to eventually evolve and in large part from the work
of information agents starting in a relatively near future, we may question
the value of our current involvement. That remains a question for personal resolution.
At any rate, the novel ecology of the cyber world is not yet with us and may
not be of noticeable importance for some time to come. Timing is an imponderable.
The picture of knowledge generation
and utilization presented in this paper may seem to lead to the long-term futility
of cognitive ergonomics. As science and technology get taken over by more powerful
cognitrons, whatever ergonomic science is available at that time will be swept
into the new scientific framework and be quickly outpaced. This implies that
our human cognitive science, that which we are involved with currently, is a
short-term venture, with value of course, but nevertheless limited. This applies
not only to ergonomics, but to all of science.
Perhaps the most exciting areas
of cognitive ergonomics in the near future will be those involved in the design
and development of cognitrons, those artificial agents which will eventually
outpace humans in cognitive performance.
No value judgment is made on
this endeavor, nor should one be made. How to handle this evolution of cognition
is certainly open to debate, but this is not the forum for that political and
ethical discussion. An assumption is simply made here, based on the progress
of current technology, that technological invention leading to cognitrons will
not likely be impeded, or that any attempted impediment will not succeed.
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