If NASA can forget (ok, “lose knowledge”) how to return to the moon and the US can forget how to make certain missiles, I’m sure we can be forgiven for our daily absent-mindedness. I am, however, surprised information of national, even global, importance can be just…lost. And it makes me wonder what we are losing today. Or, are we losing anything? Does Google (and enterprise data management) capture all? Obviously, once we capture everything, then we’re faced with a new range of problems: how to make sense of abundance, how to recognize what’s important in different contexts, etc.
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2 Comments
I think that when we (personally) forget, we gain the opportunity to re-learn and re-evaluate. By doing so, we will learn based on new context which was unavailable when the forgotten was first learnt, and thus have the opportunity to fit things into the overall pattern in a more robust way.
For institutions forgetting, I would think the same would apply. Presumably for an institution to forget something, it must either lose the actual information or any way to link to it (or, possibly, the route to link to it becomes extremely obscure).
If information is perfectly retained, as you say, there is a fresh set of problems. It is possible that we will develop systems that are better able to interpret the data our computers hold and make sense in that way, extracting and distilling knowledge from it. Otherwise it seems likely that we will be keeping the data for no apparent purpose – although if someone, somewhere can make sense of any piece of data in a new context it may be important somewhere down the line.
The story of Funes the Memorious might be a lesson here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm
“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”