Automation, a curse or a blessing?

The invention of automated data collections, or databases, with a technical term, provided a great improvement compared to the old filing systems. Especially the corresponding software, the so-called database management software, makes such databases more reliable and easier to handle.

At first, we only had databases that contained numbers, but nowadays anything can be stored in a computer, such as texts, pictures, images, sound fragments and what not, possibly stored on CDs that can be played interactively. What astonishes me is the number of databases and the amount of information that is stored in them. It would have been almost impossible in ‘manual’ days.

Are we exercising a kind of knowledge capitalism? We ought to say factual knowledge, really, in view of our misconception of the word knowledge. Have we – and I mean individuals, companies, government institutions21), departments, et cetera – all got our own warehouses stocked with so-called information? It wouldn’t surprise me, in view of the fact that we never learned in school how to deal with information and that we were raised with the universal misunderstanding that possession of huge quantities of facts actually amounts to knowledge. A slightly updated quotation of what King Thamos of Egypt said is in order here: ‘By placing our faith in databases, we seek our memory outside ourselves by means of strange characters.’

Is it really necessary to know everything? Is it truly functional to store everything that is available? What do you think? Analogous to Lao Tse[24], who was quoted earlier on: Those who know do not store anything on a floppy disk, those who store things on floppy disks do not know anything.

A machine that has strongly stimulated the collection of so-called knowledge is the photocopier. In the old days, when we had to learn something from a textbook, we would read the passage concerned and if necessary we would write a summary of it. Nowadays, we make a photocopy, place the photocopy on the pile ‘yet to read’ and think we may call the knowledge on the page in question our own. Well, you all know that we will throw out the entire pile after keeping it a few years, without reading any of it. And still we have the feeling that we have accumulated knowledge. Might King Thamos, that irritating know-it-all, be right after all, or will the followers of the god Thoth continue with this data avalanche? When we copied things from a textbook through writing, we would make the careful consideration of ‘Do I need it?’ This threshold becomes lower all the time with the use of the photocopier, the fax and E-mail. All of them instruments that facilitate the spreading of information, but also instruments that induce redundancy of data.

I think that I am starting to discern a phenomenon that I would like to call ‘an inclination towards sinus tables’. In my high-school days there were no pocket calculators, so that we had to use sinus tables if we needed the value of this goniometric function. When I was reading theoretical physics, my computer programmes (written in ALGOL ’60 of course, and entered on paper tape) required many sinus values. Because the X8 computers that we used in those days were rather slow, we used automated sinus tables, rather than having the sinus function calculated at every call. So in stead of using our knowledge about the sinus, the algorithmic structure, the manifest values were stored and used. I get the same feeling now, when I see all these databases. Databases on different (organisational) levels, ranging from large, central databases to our own small files on the ‘personal’. In stead of acquiring insight, we store manifest factual knowledge. Manifest factual knowledge that is also dropped in my mailbox with great frequency. A mass of data which isn’t digested, and therefore causes information diarrhoea. Is creating and filling databases addictive? Does it draw us permanently into fixed patterns? Or does it give us the freedom to let go? What do you think?

And to think that we are only at the beginning of explosive developments in memory technology. Experts say that by using holography (an application of laser technology) traditional magnetic memory media will be outstripped by a factor 10 to 100.