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 "
