The value of breadth

As the present regime shifts to one controlled by uncertainty and accelerating technology, the premium on breadth of knowledge compared to depth, continues to increase. Innovation appears to happen at the intersection of fields and not in secluded domains and that is an important issue that educational institutions need to consider as they design futuristic curriculums.

It is also highly problematic. As an example, business graduates tend to be broad and shallow and if the stated hypothesis holds true, they should do well in the future. However, it is more complex than that. As the value of the individual is intricately correlated with how she can improve the economics of societies, it is not just the breadth of knowledge that gets into the objective function but also applications of it. Here, shallow and broad knowledge suffers from interactions with institutional constraints. The politicians in Washington are certainly shallow and not necessarily broad. Without deep knowledge of technology, policy-makers are ill-equipped to do anything good for future generations, let alone for themselves. They could be well advised to go deeper, perhaps a few inches below the ground they walk.

A bifurcation is in the cards. There is an optimum shape - breadth over depth - that optimizes societal progress. The pride of the country, the graduate schools, are without a clue, chasing after the latest "trends," to optimize localized economics. They need and want to make money by selling the latest wares and they are beginning to resemble a used car sales tent. It is unfortunate. Those who want to advance knowledge and improve societies, need to get out of the artificial and rigid constraints placed on them - academic, political and economic - and attempt to shape thinking beyond their career horizons. That is a tough ask even for those who already secured tenure, but still counting the number of incremental papers they published in marginal journals.

The value of breadth is increasing but not for those who do not have any depth.

Right brained Artificial Intelligence

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more commonplace through hype and reality, it may be useful to characterize the plethora of methodologies and technologies that are part of the thoroughly confusing medley. Conventional AI appears to be largely driven by the left brain as engineers, data scientists, and technologists flock to the dream, ably assisted by capital, seeking returns somewhere. Generally speaking, that is a prescription for disaster as technology, data and mathematics do not typically solve any problem of importance to enterprises. Granted, game playing is interesting and faking human voices and interactions equally compelling but none of these are going to change anything in the lives of ordinary people. And, they add little value to the economy or even companies.

The search giant recently proclaimed that AI gets more aggressive as they get better. This observation is not substantially different from the twitter girl created by another giant, that turned nasty. What these companies seem to be missing is that building AI bottoms up from historical data will simply reflect existing information content. More generally, these AI agents should reflect society and such observations add no value to the emerging arena, except talking points. And as the hardware company found out down South recently, transforming an organization requires a bit more than a "pizza-sized box," albeit it has solved most of the world's problems already.

It is about economics, stupid!. And that requires the silent right brain. AI has enormous potential but only if they are developed with a right brain dominance. It is a tough task as the normally shy right brain prefers to work from the background and simply muffles out the noise created by the left hemisphere. The old-fashioned concept of, "seeing the big picture," is still very important before diving into the details. Education systems tend to churn out left only brains in great numbers and this is problematic for the emerging regime. Scientists, whether real or of the data kind, cannot solve the problems facing humanity, let alone companies.

As the singularity enthusiasts revise the date of arrival of the discontinuity, it is important to remember that civilizations did not advance by tactics in the past and it is unlikely in the future.

The fragmentation of knowledge

Philosophers of yesteryear have argued that knowledge emanates from integration and not fragmentation. Even the early scientific disciplines, such as religion, attempted to integrate and simplify information into a set of holistic heuristics. That has been a highly successful process for most of human history. But in the modern world, largely dominated by contemporary scientific disciplines, fragmentation reigns supreme. This is problematic.

Information does not unambiguously lead to knowledge. Diving deep into silos with impenetrable walls has been the defining characteristic of modern education. As one gets deeper and deeper into highly structured information, the chance of creating knowledge largely disappears. This is because of conventional academic metrics favoring the known rather than the less certain and lack of integration across disciplines, aides tunnel vision. Here, the publishing gurus who make trivial incremental improvements to the known, win and those who seek the periphery, perish. Here, the managers of businesses driven by measurable tactics, win and those with stars in their eyes, lose predictably. Here, politicians who can appeal to emotions, win and those who make cogent arguments that could advance humanity, lose. Here artists who produce conventionally expected work, win and those who explore emerging areas, lose. Here, musicians who can scream and babble win, and those who integrate lyrics with beauty, lose. Here, those who want to make the world better lose, and those who want to dominate it, win.

Knowledge is not trivial and few achieve it.

Gut feel

A recent finding (1) that shows that the gut uses a variety of communication channels to rapidly communicate with the brain has implications for the prevention and treatment of many diseases, including obesity and the metabolic syndrome spectrum. Many had this intuition but now hard data is showing that humans are driven largely by their gut with the brain playing the role of a computer, merely calculating and shuttling instructions. This is not surprising. For over half a million years, they sought food for survival and the gut and its occupants, the constituents of the microbiome, have been reigning supreme. The overgrown appendage, the brain, serves little purpose in the grand scheme of things.

The recent reversal of roles has the brain scrambling to divide itself into two halves - the tactical and the strategic. Enormous excess capacity allows it to process ancient rules and instructions without breaking a sweat. The ensuing boredom has led it to seek utility from abstract ideas such as art, music, and literature. With science and technology in the background, not requiring significant processing power, the brain can float above triviality and the routine.

This is problematic. An organ, largely intended as a conventional computing resource, is wasting itself, getting involved in thought experiments, at least from the perspective of the gut. A bifurcating human architecture, still fundamentally managed by the microbiome in the gut, coupled with a confusing potpourri of capabilities upstairs, could portend disaster. The toys they have invented are now growing into entities without guts and that will certainly pose a challenge to the declining species.

The decline of the advanced entity is predictable but that has implications for the most successful species for nearly 5 billion years. A world controlled by silicon and light will be bad news for the microbiome. It is unlikely that the species that dominates the universe will let that happen.


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-connected-your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit