Knowledge is power, not wisdom

I’ve just been watching IBM’s smarter planet team’s Internet of Things video on what they think a smarter planet should be. In a Matrixy, Neuromancer kind of way they try to paint a rosy picture of a utopian future where everything is interconnected, which to their way of thinking makes the planet smarter. This is at odds with the dystopian future painted in The Matrix and Neuromancer and equally at odds with reality.

Even if the intelligent connection between systems painted in the video becomes reality that doesn’t make the planet smarter, it makes the systems devised by humans smarter, which is exactly the premise behind those systems taking over the planet as envisaged in science fiction works such as The Terminator and The Matrix.

When the internet first began a mantra was born that said “information wants to be free”. This is often misunderstood as meaning that information should be available to all at no cost. What it really means is that information was finally freeing itself from the tethers of books and libraries to become available to all via the internet. The mobile revolution, which is just beginning, is finally witnessing that becoming a reality as information frees itself from the tether of the desktop PC and becomes available to us where and when we need it.

All of this comes at a price of course, both in setting up the systems to store and deliver this information but even more importantly in our human capacity to digest and understand it. The IBM team proffer the DIKW paradigm as a truism; saying that Data becomes Information then Knowledge and this leads to Wisdom, by what magical osmosis they fail to specify.

Wisdom is borne out of experience and that comes at a cost. The development of understanding cannot happen magically, which is why the nightmare scenarios painted by the afore-mentioned science fiction stories is as much a piece of empty romanticism as IBM’s vision. The planet, or indeed the universe, isn’t talking to us through matrices of data and systems it speaks to our soul. The planet doesn’t need to get any smarter but human beings do.