[felixmar]

Other than leaks via Wikileaks etc. i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information. Instead of searching for hours or even days it's now minutes. Time effiency increased a lot with the internet.

Because it is now so much faster to get information the question has become: is the info that i want really relevant to me? Otherwise it is still a time waster even though it only takes a minute to look up. Like many people here i tend to be intellectually curious and knowing things gives satisfaction. But increasingly i have come to realize that much is not truely relevant to me. I think that's where the focus should be for future technologies, helping people get small amounts of highly relevant information while respecting their privacy.

[nekopa]

I wonder if more than you think is actually relevant to you? The old adage is you get data, give it structure and it becomes information. I am thinking that maybe nowadays we need the next level: get information, give it 'structure' and it becomes... What?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently due to an article here on HN about the fact that we are getting lots of 'data' recently in the form of scandalous articles in the media, which shock and dismay us, but are we tying these all together into a larger picture? I don't think so, therefore we end up with the modern day equivalent of shamans - conspiracy theorists. They see the 'data' (or nowadays in its current higher level form information) and give us 'information' about what it means (sorry, I'm still struggling with what the higher form of information is).

Shamans saw dark clouds on the horizon and said the gods were angry, conspiracy theorists see the NSA spying and say 'illuminati'

Now I've done a fair bit of work on KMSs (knowledge management systems) and that could be one view, structured information becomes knowledge. But I think that that is somehow missing the point. Information+structure+experience+remembrance = knowledge (one way of looking at it IMHO) So I'm searching for an other, different way to think about this issue, because that doesn't quite seem to fit the bill here.

Is the path data>information>knowledge>wisdom ? Or are we missing steps, or even missing completely different paths?

Or is it not even a path, but more of a n-dimensional network that is recursive in time and size?

Maybe this should be the future focus of technologies.

[anonyfox]

Very interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing! Let's try to map it to a somewhat simplified system:

data = many news-websites out there

|

v

information = RSS/Atom News Items of the sites above (basic data structure, highly available today)

|

v

knowledge = ??

|

v

wisdom = ??

... Do you have some ideas floating around how this concrete example could be expanded further?

[nekopa]

I think you have to shift the graph: what you have under info- rss atom etc, should move up to the data position.

Then what? You could do something simple like keyword grouping - '500 news events including the word "drone"' but I feel that is not enough. Take it further and use semantics to do sentiment analysis maybe? '50 data point talking positively about airbnb today'

But I still think there is something missing. I'm interested in any other thoughts you may have, especially after shifting info-now down to data, what would be 'new' knowledge or wisdom?

[anonyfox]

Okay, my thoughts now are something like this:

data: RSS/Atom stuff

information: do a basic keyword-analysis of the news snippets, maybe with some natural language processing, push it all into a graph database, using meaningful nouns as nodes and verbs as edges. Think of something like DBpedia, but with tiny information pieces and high interconnectedness between. This would be good structured "information", right?

knowledge: define some sophisticated query language / data endpoint, ideally again with some natural language processing, to discover the informations in the graph. the result of such a sophisticated query i'd call 'knowledge'.

wisdom: ?? <-- no idea yet, sorry.

[bliti]

The point Elon Musk makes is about information equality. It seems you were lucky enough to be at a place in time where a good amount of information was readily available. Not me. I had to depend on very old encyclopedias. No libraries available and no one to ask. Now days, thanks to the web, I have the same general access as you. Which is his point about equality.

When he mentions the president, the point seems to be that the person holding that position could simply ask and get the information he desired. That option was not available to the masses until web search came to be. And think about it. You do have access to a lot of sensitive information. Such as updated maps of every country. Direct and instant communication with people from other nationalities. And so on.

[untog]

i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information.

But time restriction is information restriction. Who in the 1980s had the time to sit in a library for hours on end every day researching esoteric issues? I'd argue that the information wasn't meaningfully available to everyone - only people in academic careers that had time to conduct research.

[JonSkeptic]

I agree, but I also think the poster to whom you are responding has a valid point as well. The internet gives us access to a lot of useful information. It also gives us access to orders of magnitude more useless information. And the President of the United States? Well, I just hope that 30 years ago his information was better than what I can find by Googling. (Though hind-sight makes most things clear)

I think the President comparison is useful, because we, if nothing else, have the ability to access so much information that would have made the President's jaw drop three decades ago. However, I agree with the minor nitpick that he had access to higher quality, classified information that the rest of us will never see.

Also, I find this comic to be 100% relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=759#comic