Machine/Human Integrated Learning Technologies I

What would have Seneca, a stoic Roman philosopher, thought of today’s information overload? 2,000 years ago he was concerned that too many books could be a distraction…

The amount of data, information and knowledge in today’s world is enormous, and keeps growing at an amazing pace. In the past, this was shared between books and people, today it is shared also with machine and internet with the latter having the lion share and with the machine steadily growing their share. Humans have already lost their leadership as “reservoir” of knowledge and there are already a few areas where the mass of data is so huge to be beyond the possibility of human to grasp them without the intermediation of machines (computers). To mention just one, the Large Hadron Collider produces 600 million MB of data per second of operation (600 TB per second). The process of learning in ancient times was a person to person business. It evolved with books (tablets, papyrus, parchments first) that over centuries became more and more important both as repository of information/knowledge and as a learning tool. The abundance of information is obvious today, but it was felt in the past as well, indicating that “abundance” is a relative concept (“distringit librorum multitude” – the abundance of books is distraction- Seneca -2000 years ago). Interesting the observation of Denis Diderot, the editor of the 1755 Encyclopédie :

“…one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”

What Diderot missed (understandably) is that machines would come to the stage managing data, information and knowledge, They are also becoming tools for learning and in the context of this White Paper their symbiotic relation with humans create a shared knowledge base. The access to knowledge is becoming easier and easier so that it matters less and less where the knowledge is actually stored (there are social, political and ethical issues affecting the sharing of knowledge and its location but these will be tackled in a later part of this White Paper, from a technology point of view it is becoming irrelevant the actual location of knowledge as far as it is a shared knowledge). In a symbiotic relation the knowledge present in one of the component of the symbiotic relation is a knowledge of the symbiotic system as a whole. Consequently, the learning of any component in the system correspond to the learning of the whole system. This means that we are now confronted with the question of where it is more effective to learn in a symbiotic system, which of its component is more suited to the learning of a specific topic. Obviously, this makes sense only if it is true that all components are in a symbiotic relation with respect to knowledge, i.e. if any component needing a specific knowledge can access it, seamlessly, when need arises, independently of where that knowledge is “stored”. The access, hence, becomes crucial and access more and more has to be seen as an interaction: it is no longer the retrieval of data (a query to a data base) rather the sharing of needs resulting in the sharing of knowledge.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.