Infollectual and post-truth

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Infollectual and post-truth

Sunday, 28 October 2018 | Pramod Pathak

Infollectual and post-truth

What is an Infollectual? Well to understand this we need to understand the term intellectual first, because that is the word from which infollectual has been adapted. Intellectual, though not a very standard term in general usage, has now found place in Dictionaries. It is a term related to a person’s ability to think and understand, especially complicated ideas. It is also used to denote a person who is involved in activities that involve careful thinking and mental effort. By the same token, we can derive the meaning of infollectual. Infollectual is a person who is involved, rather obsessed with information. Technically speaking it is someone who is crazy about data which is not exactly information. Whatever, but the key issue is the infomania. Hence there is a problem. It is said, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.” This quote is attributed to noted Poet T.S. Eliot. But that is not the point. The point is what this deluge of information is doing to human intellect. In this era of post-truth, there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation being floated as information. So, the mind is getting crammed with such data. Silly data, fictitious data, malicious data, even salacious data. It is these that contaminate the mind of humans these days. So, all sorts of funny and idiotic things are happening. And they are bound to. The reason being that human mind works best when it is open, like the parachute. Since all this data has filled the entire mental space, there is no room for knowledge to enter. Interestingly, there is more and more craving for data creating a log jam-like situation. The mind in such situations cannot work. It is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled, as Plutarch had said. As there is no space, there is little room for maneuverability. So, in the process, let us see what is happening. As human ability to think is gradually losing its unique ability to arrange and rearrange, or rather manipulate information, algorithm based technologies are fast replacing human intellect. Creativity, which was largely a human cutting edge ability, is getting blunted. So, Watson-like creation is now supposed to replace human ability. Industry 4.0 is the fanciful imagination of the people who think they matter. The various nomenclatures that seem to blunt human thinking are cyber-physical system, the internet of things and cognitive computing promising to create the smart factory. But fanciful jargons notwithstanding, they are still grappling with the idea how to replace human imagination and creativity, collectively called insight. While insight learning experiments were carried out by experimental psychologists as early as the 1950s, and on rhesus monkeys, the cyber bigwigs have created machines whose cognitive abilities are still equivalent to midgets. So, Deep Blues and Watsons to Siri and Alexa have still a very long way to go. Those advocating AI replacing HI seem to miss the basic point that God created the Human Machine and human machine created the intelligent machine. Motivated campaigns may generate much heat but when it comes to light God certainly has an upper hand, as He has proved. Smartphones and smart machines are still poor substitutes for smart humans. But a word of caution — we need to give plenty of exercise to our mind. No amount of design thinking can replace human thinking design.

Pathak is a professor of management, writer, and an acclaimed public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com   

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