[fastball]

Does the future of knowledge management involve using lots of AI to organize pieces of knowledge?

I think "here be dragons", and that over-relying on AI to do all your organization for you will very possibly (probably?) cause you to become worse at thinking.

No data to back this up because it is still early days in the proliferation of such tools, but historically making learning and thinking and "knowledge management" more passive does not improve outcomes.

[bhpm]

> I think "here be dragons", and that over-relying on AI to do all your organization for you will very possibly (probably?) cause you to become worse at thinking.

Socrates said exactly this.

But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

[fastball]

Fair, but the difference is that "remembering from the inside" and "writing stuff down" are still both activities that you are doing. And to in spite of this quote, writing does make the process of remembering/synthesizing information more active – you are engaging more parts of the brain in order to think about and write down the material. We have seen this on fMRIs, and there is a decent amount of evidence that handwriting works even better for this than typing, due to the higher level of spatial awareness involved (that's the theory).

An AI doing the work for you is the opposite of that.

[OJFord]

> > I think "here be dragons", and that over-relying on AI [...]

> Socrates said exactly this.

I roughly recalled where you were going to go with that afterwards, but I couldn't help but 'spit take' at that given some of the quotes he does get credited with!

[davidy123]

So if you only converse with LLMs (and never write or read anything), is the problem solved?

[GTP]

I don't think that the problem would be becoming worse at thinking, but I see a possible related problem. Each one of us has its own way of organizing things, that looks logical to us but not necessarily to others: think about how you organize things inside your home vs where other people put their stuff. A similar issue could arise with AI tools, that will classify and organize documents based on their logic, which doesn't necessarily align with ours.

[samlhuillier]

I agree with this.

In some cases, hard thinking and searching for things manually can really enhance understanding and build your knowledge.

In other cases, particularly when ideating for example, you want to be given "inspiration" from other related ideas to build upon other ideas you've had previously.

I think it's a mix of both - reaching for AI as and when when you need it - but avoiding it intentionally at times as well.

[hgomersall]

Honest discussion point: do you think organisational stuff is important thinking? IME it's precisely this sort of stuff that distracts me from thinking about hard stuff - the urgent displacing the important.

[turnsout]

You’ve discovered the dirty secret of PKM… it’s most useful for shuffling stuff around and feeling productive to avoid doing real work

[ParetoOptimal]

I think you want to organize your own knowledge graph and then use the LLM to find novel connections or answer questions based upon it.

[fastball]

But if you are the one finding connections in your knowledge graph, then the neurons are not only connected on your machine but in your brain as well.

Probably a moot point once we have brain-machine interfaces, but we're not quite there yet.