Letʼs begin with two curiosities of knowledge...

Systems biology is a new science, a little more than ten years old. Itʼs interested in how chemicals interact across the cell wall, among other things.

This signaling across cell walls is so complex that it takes a computer to manage all of the relations. Humans cannot understand it without a computer.

Eureqa derives equations from data. The equations and formulae work, but we donʼt understand them.

So, at least we have the technology to let us scale up our knowledge. But, we sometimes get knowledge without understanding.

Two quick consequences. First, this traditional diagram expresses the Westʼs basic strategy for dealing with knowing a world that is too big to know: We reduce knowledge at every step.

But now that we have technology that scales, we are able to have knowledge without reducing what there is to know

Second, if we have computers by which we know things that we cannot understand, imagine youʼre a government minister (or a CEO) who asks the computer a question such as how to solve the current economic crisis, and it comes back with this answer. How do you get any political will to follow the advice if

A quick reminder of what knowledge has been in the West.

(a) Knowledge has been rare: It winnows out the true from all those mere opinions.

(b) Settled. We donʼt say we know something unless and until all reasonable people agree on it. (cc) thomas23 @ flickr

(c) Traditional knowledge is orderly. Everything has its place, and to know what something is is to know itʼs place in this order. This now sounds medieval, which it was, but itʼs certainly something we believed all the way through the 19th century and well into the 20th. To deny it was to declare oneself either a heretic or Itʼs not an accident that the traditional properties of knowledge are the same as the properties of libraries. Paper, books, and libraries have been the medium for the preservation and communication of knowledge. Knowledge winnows because the economics of the paper publishing system and the limited space of libraries meant we were forced to winnow, curate. Knowledge is settled because its medium didnʼt allow for

Knowledgeʼs new medium is the Internet. Just as knowledge picked up properties from its old paper medium, itʼs now picking up the Internetʼs properties. Knowledge is becoming networked. Letʼs look at four familiar knowledge networks.

The first example is the networking of science ((cc) Howzey @ Flickr

When scientists discovered data that indicated neutrinos might travel faster than the speed of light, which would have overturned Einstein’s relativity theory, this very important research was not published in a peer reviewed journal. It was published at Arxiv.org where any scientist can post work at any stage of readiness, without any editor or peer having to They posted there because it gets the information out quickly. And Arxiv includes some social tools.

As a result, a web of responses emerged quickly, filling every niche of the knowledge ecosystem. This is where knowledge is happening because paper doesnʼt scale. I think itʼs fair to say in some sense that knowledge is living in these networks now, not in paper and not in individual nodes. This web has value On the hopeful side, weʼve seen the emergence of ways of living together in disagreement. For example, scientists in the 19th century lost a lot of time arguing over how to classify the platypus.

And we have many different names for it.

E.g., Encyclopedia of Life scientists can ask to see information using whatever name and taxonomy they want. This enables collaboration across differences.

If you need to get started there are thousands of tutorials

if you have a question you can get it answered, and then iterated on.

If you want to build on someone else’s work. 100s of thousands. Heading toward half a million.

For example, mbostock created d3, a fantastic set of visualization libraries, free and open to anyone.

Public learning: Education should be a public act that makes the public sphere smarter.

Weʼre very good at organizing things, but not just so that we can find them again.

In the West weʼve assumed that to know something is to know itʼs unique place in the order of things.

But take a look at Flickr. The Library of Congress posted some color WWII photos there and let users add metadata. Messy. Inconsistent. At times even in error, although those errors can be helpful. We are no longer stuck with coming up with a single “right” order.

We all know about the power of customer knowledge. This is collective knowledge.

Markets now are networks. Together they provide a type of networked knowledge.

And they are the best source of knowledge for many types of questions

Networked markets are smart because...

What holds these networks together is human interest. Every link expresses something that people care about.

These are properties of the Internet and are becoming properties of knowledge too.

Theyʼre also properties of humans trying to know a world vastly bigger than them. Networked knowledge is thus much closer to our situation as humans.