MartyMcFly42oh
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- May 19, 2021
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Yes but it’s still tardedestimate on how much of human knowledge is now digitized?
Short take: we’re nowhere near “most of human knowledge is digital.” A fair triangulated range is ~15–30% of humanity’s documentary knowledge has been digitized in some form; the share that’s searchable and open on the web is lower.
Why that range (best proxies we have):
Bottom line: think iceberg—a growing digital tip, but a huge mass of undigitized or unsearchable material (local archives, audiovisual, physical ephemera) still below the waterline. Even inside the digitized slice, a lot isn’t indexed, public, or rights-cleared, so it can’t yet feed the tools we use.
- Books: Google estimates ~130M distinct titles exist; by 2019 they’d scanned 40M+ → roughly ~30% of books have at least a scan. Wikipedia
- Libraries/archives/museums (Europe, the best-measured region): large surveys found only ~17–20% of collections had been digitized as of mid-2010s; a majority still to do. Progress continues, but the baseline shows how far there is to go. Europeana PRO+1
- Storage vs. accessibility: by 2002 digital overtook analog, and by 2007 ~94% of stored information was digital—but much of that is private, transient, or duplicated data, not curated “knowledge.” WIRED Martin Hilbert
Point is, is that AI has been here a long time. It's here to stay. It's just now beginning to wake up. Nobody is talking about it, but it's the biggest existential threat humanity has ever faced. It may not be that "smart" yet, but just give it a year or two.
@Putthataway I agree that AI isn't all that smart. But it now underpins almost everything, from the power grid, to the internet, from gps to predictive text. It's more like a library or information repository, that can be accessed near instantly by the fastest librarians on the planet. It can help one learn near anything. Think Google search on steroids.
Without AI you might as well toss your grow in the dumpster. It uses the power grid. You use the internet to access this site to get instructions and seeds, etc. You most likely use predictive text to communicate. You most likely use gps when traveling to unknown places. I'm guessing you use a smart phone to take pics of your plants and upload them. Everything AI now underpins is too much to even list.
It's feared, reviled and ostracized like most major advancements have been. I figure, at my age, instead of getting plowed under, I'll just take the tractor reins and scream yeeeeeee hawwwww! on the way down...
(I realize the plows are wrong, but you get the idea)
I kidddd I kiddd. Back when I was first exposed to computers in 4th grade elementary school, our computer lab teacher explained computers in the simplest way possible. “A computer is only as smart as the person who is using it is. “ this was around 1989-1990 and we were learning how to traverse the continent via a trail that lead to Oregon. I think although so much has changed in the past 35 years, that that statement still holds water. I know that the topic is AI but isn’t AI just a computer program connected to other computers that have data stored on them? So I guess what I’m saying is that AI can be as smart or “tarded” as you want it to be, it’s all about how you use it. Ohhh yeah one more thing
