Holoscience

The Library of Babel

In the short story The Library of Babel Argentinian metaphysical writer Jorge Luis Borges tells of an infinite library. In this library are found all the books the world has ever seen. In all languages. Their translations into all languages. Further, all the books that ever will be written. And those that never were written. Not to mention those written in languages that never existed. And so on. The trouble is, the library is unusable! Just try grabbing a book, and you are likely to face an incomprehensible jumble of unfamiliar letters. All the knowledge of the world, all its most precious secrets and deepest mysteries, are somewhere within this library, yet only within reach of the infinitely lucky.

The potential

We, too, have our Library of Babel: there is the World-Wide Web, the fully-mapped genetic code, row upon endless row of black letters on white paper, the daily news consuming both the world’s forests and our minds. We have Google promising to map the world’s knowledge—recalling myself as an eager 5-year-old determined to learn eveeeeeeeeeeerything by devouring the atlas and encyclopaedia. Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly recently described his vision of the single library, The Library of Everything. This library will have not only all the books, articles, and web pages ever written but will also see its users hyper-linking, tagging, and commenting on the text, much as blogs, Wikipedia, and social netweorking sites such as del.icio.us are doing today to the existing web.

Kelley is a visionary who believes that we are at the cusp of a new reality wherein all the knowledge of the world would be available to people living at the farthest reaches of the world. A child in Tierra del Fuego or Easter Island could access the venerable library collections of the world: Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the Library of Congress, even their equivalents outside of the English-speaking world, and any tiny library anywhere that would care to join the project, will all be at the tip of a keystroke. We already possess the technological means for turning this dream into reality: given present technology, at most a few large rooms would be needed to house the computers comprising this fully-digitized library; distributed networking (the inter-linking of individual computers through the Internet to provide massive computer power) would further simplify things. The distributed nature of the process of digitization would similarly guarantee that, given sufficient will and broad appeal, the world’s books could be scanned in time. Assuming their legal availability—an issue that is being much thought about and fought over these days—books could become the ultimative nodes of the World-Wide Web, each a refined product of a hard-working human mind seeking for his voice to be heard.

The potential downside

Seeing all this excites me but also makes my head spin. In fact, I often experience this phenomenon when visiting a book- or record-store: I enter fresh and eager, and exit exhausted and confused. Perhaps this is me, but when faced with too much choice, I choose not to choose. Economists have begun to recognize this phenomenon, which clashes with classical theories concerning what they refer to as ‘rational choice’: classically speaking, we were said to be rational creatures who delight in abundance—“the more, the merrier.” It turns out, however, that we humans do not always delight in the great freedom that we are said to crave more than life itself. Instead, as described in Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (reviewed here), abundant choice often brings up the anxiety associated with the thought that, for whichever choice that we have made, perhaps one of the other ones available to us would have been better. So we have a psychological reality to deal with here: the value of The Library of Everything when considered per se increases without bounds as the library grows, but its value to us decreases in direct proportion to the cognitive overload we experience when faced with the choice of which item to pull off the e-shelf. We need not actually to be faced with an infinite library: after all, to some of us the neighborhood record-store is sufficient for triggering this anxiety.

This problem of accessing knowledge is, of course, what brought about search engines in the first place. Rather than displaying all the world’s web-pages on a flat platform—perhaps a possibility in the first days of the Internet, or if we were to borrow Time Square’s giant display—Google has provided us with the premier tool for sifting through endless amounts of data without setting our heads spinning. Indeed, I do not suffer from overload when executing Internet searches: they seem more like serial monogamy than, say, a visit to a harem (which, by the logic above, would set my head spinning and my feet rushing out the door). But I do find myself spending more time ‘googling’ (no longer a proprietary term but a verb immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary!) than communing with fellow human beings. All that in the name of knowledge.

This arms race between the expansion in knowledge and our ability to access it is ongoing. Whether or not we are set to win or to lose is an open question. In my next entry I will propose a guiding principle that could help us keep ahead in this race between human and computer.