A better formatted version is at http://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/publications/four-connectivities-of-the-information-age
Four Connectivities of the Information Age While Google and Wikipedia serve as the steam engine of today, the full potential of this Information Age is yet to unfold. I envision a future civilization characterized by four pillars that will make the world work as a single mind. I. Data connectivity As long as we have a person's email address or a resource's address (such as a website's URL), we can approach this person or resource. Such a capability is dubbed "data connectivity" in this article. Data connectivity is omnipresent, with the exception that it is still restricted in certain countries and regions, where efforts are committed on all levels to mitigate the interferences. II. Language connectivity Data connectivity alone is not enough. If we can't decode a foreign language, we're unable to access valuable information and opportunities available in this language. How to technically break the language barrier is a major question for computer scientists and linguists. The problem can be further divided into two subproblems: (1) Can people learn a foreign language more efficiently and effortlessly? Automatic code-switching (ACS), among other ideas collected in Work: Ideas, will provably be the answer to this question. (2) Can people read and write information in a foreign language without actually learning that language? The writing part can be realized by using a so-called formal language, while the reading part also has plausible solutions in Work: Ideas. III. Idea connectivity The famous Babel Tower story tells that God split the humankind's single language into many and scattered them throughout the earth. In fact, language is hardly the only thing that is diversified and scattered around the world. Many a time I came up with a bright idea and tried to search Google for prior statements of the same idea, only to no avail; but eventually a person on the Net referred me to a prior art, or I myself found one via much more diligent searches (i.e. trying new keyword combinations and checking more search results). Why couldn't I find a prior art with Google easily? Because the actual prior art I wound up with was described in terms different from what I tried, or the prior art was deeply buried in a search result far beyond the first few results pages. Keyword-based information retrieval systems like Google isn't ideal for pinpointing a unique idea written in a particular combination of terms out of a million alternative keyword combinations. More mundanely, if I see an unfamiliar error message on my computer screen, I have a very good chance finding a solution by searching Google with that error message as the exact search phrase. Otherwise, if my problem doesn't have a uniquely identifiable keyword combination or key phrase, and it's not widely discussed on the Web, a search engine really can't do much. All this is essentially because an "idea" (or "thought", "meaning", "situation", "concern", or whatever you call it), unlike an error message, is something that doesn't have a single, unique and fixed form. It can take a million possible forms. Even an idea as simple as "I eat rice" can take an unpredictable form such as "rice goes down into my stomach." So, does it mean we really can't take control of the storage and retrieval of "ideas"? No. We all have the experience of locating something we're looking for in a book by following the guidance of its "table of contents", which could have never been done by searching with a blindly guessed keyword combination. Indeed, "table of contents" (a tree where each node guides you to more specific topics) and its more general variant, "cross reference" (a network where each vertex guides you to related, not just more specific, topics), can harness a human's own brainpower to effectively serve his "idea management and retrieval" needs. We can imagine that a website is like a book, and its navigation menu or sitemap serves as its "table of contents", while the Internet is like a library which is a collection of many individual "books" (websites). Although there are "library catalogs" like Yahoo Directory and DMOZ Directory, such directories only classify websites into subject categories just like library catalogs only classify books into subject categories; they cannot tell you which particular books contain a particular idea or address a particular problem (an idea/problem that is far more specific than the most specific subject category that a library catalog has to offer), and they cannot merge multiple books on similar topics into a single, well-organized reference -- you have to go through every one of them to discover each one's unique merits. How wonderful would life be if there is only a single book? If the Internet is not a set of many "books" (websites) scattered all over the place but a single "book"? And this single big book has a table of contents that can direct us all the way down to any particular concern? Fortunately, there is such a thing and its name is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has categorization and cross reference for topics as specific as conceivable, and no two pages are dedicated to exactly the same topic. So, Wikipedia is idea connectivity! Another useful property of Wikipedia is that each Wikipedia article or category can serve as a unique address, or "coordinates", for the topic (or concept, idea, whatever) it corresponds to. With this property, we can enable people with the same interest to rendezvous at the same Wikipedia page and therefore talk with each other. People could also register resources at a Wikipedia page's External Links section so that other people with the same interest can find them. People could even "subscribe" to a Wikipedia page for new and updated resources and opportunities on that topic. IV. Intelligence connectivity Now that we have Wikipedia as our idea organizer, merging great minds of all times and countries into a "common memory", and eliminating information retrieval inconveniences inherent in keyword-based search engines. Yet it is a memory and only a memory, not equipped with intelligence that can creatively solve new problems. That is to say, Wikipedia is a Mr. Know-All that can answer any question directly answerable by existing human knowledge, but it can't solve an open problem that requires a combination of several existing strategies and knowledge points. It can teach you existing knowledge in geometry but can't prove/disprove a geometry conjecture. We already have Wikipedia as "the memory" and we also want "the CPU", namely, artificial intelligence. Of course, full-automatic general-purpose AI is hard to engineer, but computer-assisted problem solving can be a first step. For example, if we're solving a math problem, we choose a seemingly promising strategy from our "strategy bases" in our minds, according to the problem's main type and characteristic conditions. Such a "strategy base" is exactly something that the computer can do for us, using the same "idea retrieval" mechanism discussed in "idea connectivity", only with the difference that this time it also does "strategy retrieval", where a "strategy" is a special kind of "idea" that caters to certain problem characteristics and provides certain problem-solving frameworks. So, the computer suggests the human relevant strategies and knowledge based on problem types and characteristics selected by the human in the strategy base's "table of contents", while the human can better focus on evaluating and applying strategies. Plus! Active connectivities We discussed above four pillars that can connect people to data, language, ideas and solutions, and based upon that, we can further explore the "active version" of each connectivity: Active data connectivity doesn't wait for the human to retrieve the data but actively pushes the data to him, an example being the "Blackberry."Active language connectivity doesn't wait for the human to learn a language but actively introduces elements of that language into his incoming/outgoing information.Active idea connectivity doesn't wait for the human to find an idea but actively suggests him relevant ideas for his current tasks/interests.Active intelligence connectivity doesn't wait for the human to encounter a problem but actively discovers potential problems that can be interesting research opportunities for him. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! 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