[Sigia-l] Findability

[Karl Fast]

> "truly understand" ? Therein lies the crux of the matter. 

Yes, indeed it does.

> I don't know what true understanding means. Are there any
> differences in this regard among, say, a 7-year old, an imbecile, a
> librarian and Karl Fast?

We are delving into some deep philosophical territory here.
Ah...let's go for it.

Perhaps "true" is unnecessary. And I can't tell you what true
understanding is either. Yet I know that a fire hydrant doesn't
understand "The Grapes of Wrath." Nor does Google or any algorithm.

But I do.

You and I could each read that book and understand it, but we would
understand it differently. And the seven year old differently again
(if he could even read it, which most likely he couldn't).

Or consider how we understand films. Do any of use truly understand
a film like 2001? Kubrick was once given an essay on his film by a
15-year old girl from New Jersey (Margaret Stackhouse) and said she
understood his film better than anyone else, including legions of
film critics and scholars.

If anyone is curious, the whole story and the essay is here:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0009.html  


Now if I gave that URL to Google it wouldn't understand it all. It
could compute things about it (much faster than I can). It can
determine it's relationship to a whole bunch of other documents thus
inferring something of value to people who do understand those
documents (or could if they read them).

But, at present, it does not understand that document in any
meaningful way that approaches human intelligence.

Will it ever? My guess is that it won't unless we have some sort of
radical breakthrough. Maybe it's already happened. Paul Saffo
says "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed
yet." So perhaps the key stuff is already in the lab and it just
needs to get out.

Regardless, I don't think that scaling up our current computational
paradigm will get us there. But that's my opinion and I could easily
be wrong. Happens all the time to me. 




--karl