All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

We’re living in an explosion of information, or so we’re told. And we are, although the usual metrics tossed around … bytes added to the Internet in a unit of time … have little to do with it.

Information is, properly defined, the stuff that reduces uncertainty. Most of these bytes don’t do this. Some deliberately increase uncertainty because their publishers want to confuse us. Some decrease uncertainty but in the wrong direction — they encourage us to believe things that just aren’t so.

Then there’s entertainment. It accounts for a lot of those bytes, but reduces no uncertainty. Unless, that is, you think knowing more about the ways of The Force counts.

But even filtering all that out, we know a lot about a lot, and more every day.

About that word we. No matter the subject and what’s known about it, even though we might know a lot, most of us don’t.

We can’t. So while, for example, we know new species arise through “survival of the fittest,” we’re wrong.

A relative few of us know it’s more interesting than that: New species are the result of random DNA mutations, some of which are sufficiently advantageous within the mutant’s environment that he, she, or it leaves behind more descendants.

Except, there’s much more to it than that. If you’re curious, Google “epigenetics” to discover just one dimension of the overall complexity.

The survival-of-the-fittest we vastly outnumbers those of us who understand the random-mutation-and-reproductive-advantage version of evolutionary theory. That we, in turn, is far more numerous than those who know what’s known about the subject.

And that’s just one subject. Imagine how much the 7+ billion people on earth know in total — how much there is to know that no one of us will ever be aware of.

We reached that inflection point — the accumulation of knowledge that made it impossible for any of us to know even a small fraction of what all of us know — a very long time ago.

I think we’ve reached another inflection point in the accumulation of knowledge that is, in its own way, even more daunting. To understand what it is …

A month or so ago my wife called my attention to an article about Edward Witten, a physicist who researches “dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature” (“A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality,” Quanta, 11/28/2017).

Prior to reading the article I wasn’t just ignorant about dualities in physics and math. I was ignorant that dualities is a subject, and only barely more aware of emergent space-time.

This is the new inflection point in human knowledge. We’re in a time when none of us knows even a tiny fraction of the subjects the collective we know something about.

We knew we were ignorant. We no longer even know what we’re ignorant about.

Faced with knowing none of us can even know all of the questions the collective we are asking, let alone what we know about the answers … faced with this, we’re each left with choosing how to cope.

There are those who simply reject it. They’re in denial, figuring anything they don’t understand just isn’t very important. Or, if it is, it’s really much simpler than what the so-called experts say.

But that makes no sense. Our brains are roughly the size of a cantaloupe. We’re using them to try to understand a universe that’s roughly 529,474,682,880,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger (linearly, assuming I did the math right). When someone thinks they might possibly have an accurate bead on what is and isn’t important to comprehend they’re displaying, I think, the height of arrogance.

If denial doesn’t work for you, consider despair. From nature’s perspective we aren’t merely physically miniscule, but as individuals our knowledge will forever be miniscule as well. Faced with this realization, giving up isn’t entirely irrational. What’s the point of learning anything, we might wonder, given the impossibility of putting even the slightest detectable dent in our individual ignorance?

What’s the point? Just turn it around. Our situation is I think, marvelous, maybe humbling, certainly not depressing. Every new discovery can be an unalloyed pleasure … like encountering Van Gogh for the first time. Human knowledge is a collection of experiences on a scale. Those on one end are merely nifty, those on the other awe inspiring. As Pogo put it, “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”

If knowledge is wealth, then no matter where we each turn there’s an embarrassment of riches to be had.

Feel free to take as much as you want. There will be plenty left for the rest of us to enjoy.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

In the early days of business computing, stupid computer tricks appeared frequently in the popular press … stories like the company that sent out dunning notices for customers who owed $0 on their accounts. (Resolution: customers mailed them checks for $0 to cover what they owed.)

Somewhere in most of these stories was an obligatory explanation, that computers weren’t really the culprits. Behind any mistake a computer made was a programmer who did something wrong to make the computer do it.

Years of bug fixes, better testing regimes, and cultural acclimatization pretty much dried up the supply of stories like these. But we’re about to experience a resurgence, the result of the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence.

This week’s missive covers two artificial-intelligence-themed tales of woe.

The first happened as I was driving to a regular destination from an unfamiliar direction. My GPS brought me close. Then it announced, “Your destination is on your right.”

Which it was, only to take advantage of that intelligence I’d have had to make a 90 degree turn that would have had me driving off the shoulder of the highway and up a steep grassy slope, at which point I could hope I’d have enough momentum to knock down the chain-link fence at the top.

Dumb GPS. Uh … oops. Dumb user, as it turned out, because I’d been too lazy to look up my client’s street address. Instead I’d entered a nearby intersection and forgotten that’s what I’d done. So AI lesson #1 is that even the smartest AI will have a hard time overcoming dumb human beings.

The more infuriating tale of AI woe leads to my making an exception to a long-standing KJR practice. Usually, I avoid naming companies guilty of whatever business infraction I’m critiquing, on the grounds that naming the perpetrator lets lots of other just-as-guilty perpetrators off the hook.

But I’m making an exception because really, how many global on-line booksellers that have authors pages as part of their web presence are there?

I was about to point a new client to my Amazon author’s page, as he’d expressed interest, when I noticed an unfamiliar title on my list of books published: The Feminist Lie by Bob Lewis.

If you’ve read much of anything I’ve written over the past 21 years you’d know, this isn’t a book I would have written. Among the many reasons, I figure men shouldn’t write books criticizing feminism, any more than feminists should write books that explain male motivations, Jews should write books critiquing Catholicism and vice versa, or Latvians should publish patronizing nastiness about Albanians.

Minnesotans about Iowans? Maybe.

But I distrust pretty much any critique of any tribe that’s written by someone who isn’t a member of that tribe and who feels aggrieved by that tribe.

But some other Bob Lewis proudly wrote a book with this title, and somehow I was being given credit for it. Well, “credit” isn’t the right word, but saying I was being given debit for it might be puzzling.

In any event, I don’t think all of us named “Bob Lewis” constitute a tribe, and I want no responsibility for the actions of all the other Bob Lewises who are making their way through the world.

And yet, somehow I was listed as the author of this little screed.

Oh, well. No problem. Amazon’s Author Central lets me add books I’ve written to my author page. Surely there’s a button to delete any I don’t want on the list.

Nope. Authors can add and they can edit, but they can’t delete.

Turns out, an author’s only recourse is to send a form-based email to the folks who run Author Central to request a deletion. A couple of tries and a week-and-a-half later, the offending title was finally removed from my list.

And, I got an answer to the question of how this happened in the first place. To quote Amazon’s explanation: “Books are added by the Artificial Intelligence system Amazon has in our catalog when the system determines it matches with the author name for the first time.”

Artificial what? Oh, right.

Which leads to one more prediction. Whereas as of this writing “artificial intelligence” has some actual, useful definitions, within two years the phrase will be about as meaningful as “cloud,” because any and all business applications will be described as AI, no matter how limited the logic.

And, as in this case, no matter how lacking in intelligence.

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