With laptop screens comfortably covering our foveal vision with high resolution information and the capability to do multiple trillion ML operations per second we can do this, and we can do it powerfully through the interactive symbols we call text. Let us augment our text to augment our thinking, let citations be simple and robust, let text describe itself for rich interactions of information connections and views. Let text be the gateway between human and machine since text has always been, and is inherently, the gateway between the fuzzy, wet–and creative, insightful–human brain the the exact, logical, grammar and rule following lines on a page.
Postscript
It surprises me that researchers who work in this area either don’t have children or are not interested in the development of children since so much could potentially be learnt of how humans learn and grow. We are not born with blank slates, nor are we born without a body–we are very much embodied and our senses develop in tandem with our interactions. In simplified terms, we learn what vision tells us by phrasing about and correlating what we see and when our arms bash into something. We are organisms composed of organs. As we grow older we thrash about in different ways, such as our beautiful 3 ½ year old ‘baby’ boy Edgar, who now chooses a new persona every 15 mins, from Elsa to whales to T-Rex, where it is very important to him to get it right, including how many talons/fingers the t-Rex has. His mind is all over the place, organising, changing, learning, questioning and moving about in a world of soft relationships, not linear graphs. This softness, afforded by the chemical and electrical wiring in our brains, is a far cry from silicon. Let’s not present otherwise and let’s not let one be jealous of the other, let’s really use the power of silicon for its strengths, in symbols with our fuzzy, soft creative brains. I just wanted to leave that in here.
Endnotes
“Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.”
References
[2] Marcus, G. & Davis, E. 2019. Rebooting AI. Vintage. ISBN: 9781524748265, 1524748269. From: http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OmeEDwAAQBAJ.
[3] Licklider, J., Man-Computer Symbiosis in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. 1960.
From https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html. [Accessed 04 03 2021].
I have felt that a great weakness of hypertext/hyperlinks is that they have to be created manually. AI through Machine Learning could be put to work in the service of human understanding, even before it is capable synthesizing knowledge per se, by allowing machine-generated hyperlinks to directly link papers.
At first this could be done by the relatively simple means of applying citations already included in the papers, and making hypertext links to the papers being referred to. This would enable a much faster review of current research than manually looking up citations. Of course the pool of papers would have to be made freely available on the internet to be entirely effective.
Another level would be to give a large number of related papers to a Machine Learning program to let it discover relevant links between papers, based partially on explicit citations but also on implicit links to earlier work based on a textural analysis of text not explicitly cited.
If this turned out to effective, it would allow readers not at first skilled in a field to get up to speed by referencing earlier research, already assumed by the authors of the research to be ‘common knowledge’ among their potential readers. This would potentially allow a wider range of people to understand current research by providing hyperlinks (an electronic ‘paper trail’) to earlier research.