We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of
knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical
experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in
nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition
could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The
interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were
such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge
arising from practical experiences of industrial society
progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings.
Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of
human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and
legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy
resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the
incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of
applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of
energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have
taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.
To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the
Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in.
Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle
and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw
materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing.
Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the
machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the
home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial
pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the
Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking
and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex
production and assembly lines that process raw materials or
synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the
manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household
functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our
homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The
scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing
the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final
product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and
on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis
are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to
transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the
locus of the Cognitive Age.
Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively
different from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do not
burn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source of
cognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources of
the Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resources
will be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and the
discovery of processes that extract more from what is available
depend more on human cognition than on brute force processing
methods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited.
But if the cognitive component of human practical experiences
were to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, the
pragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age of
Cognition would break down. To understand this, one need only
think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all
because the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with what
would happen if the most complex machine, more complicated than
anything science fiction could describe, came to a halt because
there was no human thought to keep it going.
In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributed
between processing information and acquiring and disseminating
knowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of our
existence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures,
cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the
individual human from the productive task, and from a wide
variety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary that
an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience
requires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power
plants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neither
do all workers in a space research program need to be rocket
scientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk drive
works. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or she
uses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entails
specific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requires
knowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involved
can or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformly
dispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed and
embodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage is
that programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings.
For example, data management does not substitute for advanced
knowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowed
with knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operation
schemes, management, and self-evaluation.
Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone,
layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the
digital engine. The only source of cognition that we can count
on is within people self-constituted through practical
experiences involving the digital. This does not mean that
everyone will become a thinker and everyone will produce
knowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of
Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds.
One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in
areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can
handle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found in
common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience.
We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to be
integrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specific
motivations of human practical experiences resulting in
knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must also
be aware of circumstances that could have a negative effect on
these experiences.
We know less about the second source of knowledge because in
previous pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widely
ignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into the
infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifested
through the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelming
portion of the world's population. Taken individually, each
person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader
dynamics of the world. But these individual contributions are
random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify
the effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions and
choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of
which we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is a
grain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doing
things. Here the nodal points of integration in the
multi-dimensional array that constitutes the globality of
humankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collective
persona makes such an effort worthwhile.
Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher in
education, who used to maintain interactive simulations for
youngsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the then
fashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). As
an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and
based on the theory of cellular automata, the game required
quite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Game
of Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple,
highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: a
cell going from empty to full describes birth, from full to
empty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reaching
complex forms of life.
The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available on
the network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leave
traces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up to
an expression of the intelligence of the collective body who
shared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of a
Gestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is,
the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably
comparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even much
higher! Considering all the instances of human application to
tasks that range from being frankly useless to highly
productive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledge
and intelligence is much more interesting than that of the
dedicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how we
choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate
rationality.
This collective persona need not comprise the entire population
of the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would help
to start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share an
interest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfing
for a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do I
get from here to there?" to whatever people are looking
for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes,
investment information, support in facing a certain problem,
love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. The
challenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work,
making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies of
common focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can be
utilized to enhance individual performance-all this without
shaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitive
patterns, no matter how successful they might be.
If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of
knowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledge
of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. The
civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of
individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance
of society at large.
As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be
avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We know
that it took millennia before primitive notation progressed to
writing and then to generalized literacy. In the Age of
Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating
human cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out how
much mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching football
games on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence,
nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from the
enormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practical
experiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up,
one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to this
situation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within the
motivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tap
more sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate human
interaction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that only
die on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web,
where millions of hits are counted on the pornography sites-not
on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source
of mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the
couch variety.
If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences of
human self- constitution in computer games, we could not only
further the success of the industry that changed the way humans
play, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive and
emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity.
Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (Homo Ludens),
there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, and
pleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journey
through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we
can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be
abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for
understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an
image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not
always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a
book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is
only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these
objects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one can
replace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so do
joking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us.
Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitive
resources of exceptional value are at work.
Many people from very different locations and of different
backgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Web
site, without ever knowing it. The server's performance could
suggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannot
say who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind of
cognition drives the digital engine of their particular
experiences.
While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacy
experiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhanced
by the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Many
individuals present at the same time on a Web site is not a
situation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio was
one reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape
(although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in a
class, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneously
landing on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We should
accordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to the
extent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This next
level of self-constitution and identification is where the
potential of rich interactions and further generation of
cognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources in
such situations is an opportunity we should not postpone.
Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiency
that is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to the
efficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But the
experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of
data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To
understand the intimate relation between the performance of the
digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of
a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The
civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many
obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources,
ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. To
pull the brake will only make the effort of the engine more
difficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first.
Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensible
engineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not for
the excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitive
resources.
Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstract
computing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodied
in experiences that support further diversification of
experiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enough
computing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with the
extra computing power available. On the contrary, human
practical experiences are always ahead of technology, as we
challenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips of
yesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as the
methods and means of literacy.
Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our minds
have been measured for quite a number of years. We learned from
such measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation of
our practical experience of self-identification as human beings.
The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientific
evidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition is
process, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitive
processes in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such as
through a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect,
they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitive
resources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, we
arrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for people
with disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, or
desktop film directing, allowing us to get involved with
cinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations of
the plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtual
bowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiences
possible. For those affected by disabilities, this is a
qualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, was
quite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilities
are effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engine
burns more and more cognition, this number will change, as
probably our physical condition, already marked by forms of
degeneration, will change too.
If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reach
the level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard to
imagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilization
of illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has to
address, is only at its beginning. That its duration will be
shorter than the one preceding it is another subject.
1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY;
Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany.
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