Knowledge Work

Some assume that a fundamental property of the internet is that it is globally connected, but countries, such as Iran and China, who have built their own “splinternets,” reject that assumption. Is the internet still the internet if it is not globally connected? Reconciling disparate answers is the current task of governance and standardization... See more

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources made available by digital hyperconnectivity could support such a developmentalist cultural politics. But the algorithms that feed us what we like or register what is popular — and thereby... See more

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone .

Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through descriptions. Sure, you can try to explain what it is you’re doing when you’re cycling, but this isn’t going to be of much help when you’re teaching a kid and they fall into the drain while you’re... See more

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

Storoni, a Cambridge-trained eye surgeon and neuroscience researcher, reminds readers that humans are not machines. In fact, she argues against the “linear, continuous, assembly line configuration of work” that the industrial revolution ushered in. In this digital age, she says, human efficiency should “no longer be defined by the quantity of... See more

Highlighting the consequences of an automatic society running amok, the late philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler suggested that successive ages of technological proletarianization since the 19th century have resulted in human losses first in the knowledge of how to make and do (savoir-faire), followed by the knowledge of how to live... See more

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re... See more