This text discusses the evolution of access to knowledge throughout the ages. Parents find themselves facing a generation gap with children who are always connected. This reminds us of the time before the digital era, where university research relied on physical libraries and inter-library loan systems to access scientific information. The access to knowledge has been significantly simplified with the advent of Wikipedia and conversational AI. Education is also evolving with MOOCs, but human interaction remains essential for knowledge transmission.
E. Krieger
After a rather brief phase of boundless admiration, the fate of a parent is to be inexorably considered by their adolescent children as an ancestor whose birth dates back to immemorial times. This perspective gives me the ambiguous privilege of having mingled with the tribes that spread across the planet during the Upper Paleolithic, when humanity still consisted of only 6 million people, and Neanderthals coexisted with Homo Sapiens…
As I wrote these lines, my children were respectively 14 and 16 years old, constantly connected to their tribe through social networks while exchanging hundreds of text messages every day. Approaching my fifties, I had to embrace my status as an ancient relic, and I remember not so long ago, at the end of the 1990s, when I was finishing my thesis on the respective influence of trust and calculation in the evaluation of young innovative companies. The mammoths had already disappeared, and the first Internet bubble was beginning to dangerously inflate.
Research in Management Sciences Before the Internet
In those days, one could naturally rely on their thesis advisor for progress. I also exchanged ideas with colleagues from HEC Paris and the University of Paris Dauphine, each pursuing their own quest for scientific knowledge. To complement all of this, conferences already allowed, in those distant times, to present preliminary results to peers.
To consult books or scientific articles not available on-site, HEC’s documentation center relied on a sophisticated inter-library loan system, which allowed receiving a copy of the article or even the original book being sought in just a few days. All that was left for me, the Ph.D. candidate, was to digest the relevant publications, increasingly realizing each day that my research topic was circumscribed by dozens of prior publications and that my own results would ultimately be just a drop in the ocean of existing knowledge…
During that somewhat distant era, one could still get a good overview of global knowledge by purchasing Encyclopædia Universalis or its English equivalent, the Encyclopædia Britannica, for a few thousand francs.
Digital Encyclopedias and Conversational AI
Then everything accelerated in terms of access to knowledge and the sharing of information. Wikipedia eclipsed paper encyclopedias and now provides access to 30 million articles in 230 different languages.
A young researcher undertaking a thesis today can access thousands of articles related to their research topic with just a few clicks and can exchange ideas with colleagues through social networks and converse with conversational AI. They can easily submit their publications to online journals or publish them directly on sites like arXiv.org or CiteSeer, which catalog hundreds of thousands of scientific publications. Despite speed reading techniques, the main bottleneck remains our own capacity to absorb this ocean of knowledge!
If Pico della Mirandola were born five and a half centuries later, he would no longer risk the inquisitorial tribunal, but he would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by vertigo in his quest for humanistic and syncretic knowledge.
The Vertigo of Pico della Mirandola
The digital world is destined to play an increasing role in knowledge transmission, although I doubt it will replace the interaction between a teacher and a small group of students. Basic subjects may certainly be widely taught through pedagogical devices like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), but the teacher, holder of specific knowledge and experience, will likely remain indispensable. However, they will be less of a mere receptacle of knowledge and more of a catalyst for debate among participants.
Unlike their old father, my children did not experience the Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of books that could be read in the shade of olive trees… but they cannot conceive of their schoolwork without consulting Wikipedia and seeking help from their peers on social networks. Libraries have not disappeared, but they have evolved significantly by digitizing their document collections and assisting readers in searching for complex information.
Knowledge is one of the few resources that multiplies when shared… and it is shared more and more each day! This results in an efflorescence of new theories, artistic and literary works, new goods and services, which will lead the children of my children to consider their own parents as relics of a time when it was still possible to live without being constantly connected to the Matrix.
A world that may one day become a kind of universal consciousness connecting all living beings, as in « Avatar. » The increasing entanglement of our existences with the digital sphere is clearly only in its early stages! The Neanderthal and the digital man will still coexist for a few more years, but the days of the former are clearly numbered unless he consents to create an account on one or more social networks.
Adapted from Krieger E. (2014) « De Neandertal à Wikipédia : le partage des connaissances à l’ère numérique », La Revue du Cube #6, « Partager », Avril 2014. Also published on: www.ikigai-colors.com/index.php/2023/07/27/de-neandertal-a-wikipedia-et-chat-gpt-le-partage-des-connaissances-a-lere-numerique/
