Useless information is priceless
When I was in university, I read a quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson that struck a chord: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” I followed this precept and I made it a habit of sorting out useful information from useless information because I didn’t want to clutter my memory with the latter.
Then Internet came. Tools, such as Wikipedia, accumulate information from an incomparable number of sources that it vets, links to similar subjects and offers to the public at no cost. This approach reduces the need to sort out useful and useless information. Moreover, there is no more need to distinguish the two because every tidbit of knowhow can become important, were it the blue blood of horseshoe crabs. Useless information has lost its meaning, for everything can become useful.
Now we have access to artificial intelligence. With a prompt, we can gather data and create information that didn’t exist. A smudge on an x-ray that previously wouldn’t have been catalogued can, with the accumulation of an immense amount of data, becomes important. The insignificant has become significant. A single speck of light from the Weber telescope reveals information on the beginning of the universe.
Humans are becoming servants of informed machines and the information marshaled by them will dictate our social behavior. Their needs will become paramount, overriding human wants, because our survival will depend on them. Throughout history, people relied on their offspring to care for them, as they grew older. The incarnation of machines is our posterity that will govern our descendants. Perhaps they’ll survive the next extinction and become the ambassadors of our knowledge, if somebody is to receive it?