A Glorious Victory for KM!
This is quite a radical change, for the certainty of knowledge was the reason we invented the category of knowledge in the first place: to distinguish it from mere beliefs and opinions. Now we have daily—and for many of us, hourly—evidence of the power of “merely” probabilistic knowledge. In fact, machine learning is sweeping our businesses and our culture because it’s probabilistic. We suddenly know more by doing away with certainty as our main criterion of knowledge.
Of course, we never actually achieved certainty of belief except within axiomatic systems such as math and formal logic. (We can argue about faith as knowledge at another time.) Our daily acceptance of probabilistic knowledge has snapped the impossible bonds of certainty in a remarkably short time.
However, this has “merely” clarified our everyday understanding of knowledge as always coming with a contextual tag that expressed how reliable any piece of knowledge is.
Having our theories and our daily experience aligned is, at the very least, clarifying. At the very most, it removes an unnecessary psychological impairment that treats experience as a degraded form of knowing.
Revolutionary Knowledge Tool
That AI has proven itself to be a revolutionary knowledge tool paints a different picture of the world itself. For millennia, we in the West counted as the highest knowledge the bedrock beliefs that ground the certainty of the layers of lesser knowledge that rest upon them. While the success of our culture proves the value of this approach in some critical areas, the rapid advances in knowledge enabled by machine learning based in multidimensional models that are too complex for us to understand remind us of what we’ve always already known:
Our world overwhelms our smidgeon of consciousness. And there’s no shame in acknowledging that. In fact, it is genuinely liberating to embrace the fact that the world consists of particulars in infinite relationships, and that we pay a price when we sand down the distinctive differences among them.
So, fill a goblet with mead and lead the toast: Knowledge is dead! Long live Knowledge!
P.S.: Having begun with some clickbait, I suppose I’m set up to end with a shameless plug: This column’s topic is within the territory of my new book— Beautiful Particulars: How AI’s Attention to the Smallest of Differences Is Reshaping Our Biggest Ideas—coming from MIT Press in October.