Computing Beyond Entertainment

Creating, discovering, structuring and communicating knowledge

Influenced by reading a book written 100 years ago, Tim O’Reilly asks the question, “[What will] people a hundred years from now will think of our popular fiction, our popular movies. What do we take for granted that they will find odd, and perhaps even distasteful?”

In a comment, Paul W. Homer absolutely nails the answer:

I always figured that when they look back at us, they’ll be really surprised by how muddled our thinking was. At some point, once we stop using them for entertainment, computers should start being able to help us construct clearer, more structured views of the world around us.

I could imagine a society where we aren't just randomly adding masses of irrational laws into our system, or just wasting billions in un-achievable projects. Where our knowledge isn’t a combination of spin, hype, myth and a little bit of truth, instead it's a well structured arrangement of knowledge that has been rated on quality.

These days we are so messy, so erratic and so irrational that it’s not hard to picture a huge change in our ability to accumulate and process the tonnes of information around us.

In the future, they’ll laugh at our hubris for calling this the “information age”. Of that, I am pretty sure.

Paul has neatly summarised the driving focus of this blog. How can we develop better tools and better practices to better understand the world around us? To better understand human behaviour? To take actions that will more readily serve the greater good?

What are the knowledge tools and practices that will serve humanity, rather than humanity's corporations?

What type of tools, that once in individuals’ hands, will enable them to discover and reconceptualise and reframe data, events, behaviour, power structures, relationships, causation… What intellectual practices should software tools support? And given new tools, what intellectual avenues will then newly open?

It’s going to take hard work. But software developers and knowledge creators of all kinds need to collaborate to design software suites and knowledge creation practices and forums for ideational interchange. There's some good work being done. Progress is being made. Much more needs to be done.

Last centuries’ tools won’t create our future.

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