Hello Wikipedians of WikiDC,
This video on AI (artificial intelligence) by Jaron Lanier has some food for thought regarding the "Cult of the Encyclopedia" ...
We're talking about the "Cult of the Encyclopedia" in the sense of the Lord of the Rings metaphor of "one ring/encyclopedia to rule them all ... and in the darkness bind them", the idea that somehow the Wiki Encyclopedia is the centrally located "self organizing" website that will organize the factual materials of the Internet into a coherent and usable Big Data whole ...
Check in around minute 16:30 where Mr. Lanier starts talking about how unpaid translators are the key to assembling the corpora of knowledge that makes Big Data and AI possible.
Two key thoughts:
1. The mythology that there is some emergent "super intelligence machine" generated by AI is comparable to the use of religious mythology to justify having people work for very little personal benefit on projects like the pyramids, in the service of a religious elite ...
2. When it comes down to it, even with AI and Big Data we still have the political problem of what Mr. Lanier calls "algorithms" and "actuators." In other words, it doesn't matter how fancy our technical processes are, somebody or some group has to set them in motion ...
What Mr. Lanier is only starting to consider in this video: -- The distinction between those who actually generate source data, and those who leverage the source data of others.
if you'd like some food for thought, take a look at minute 16:30, about all the unpaid translators, the source data generators, who actually make the whole Big Data system run.
http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#video
How do we strengthen the indispensable source data workers of the world's knowledge system?
All the best,
Kristin User:Djembayz