It may only be Friday, but I am ready for the weekend. Several things are ready to be recorded and some other things need attention. One of the things that the weekends afford me is the opportunity to really deeply focus on things. Finding the time to really deeply focus on something is what helps push my learning efforts forward. Every single day I approach the opportunity to learn something with vigor and enthusiasm. That is really one of the keys to being able to enjoy the hunt for new things. We have such an opportunity to pick up and learn new things. It is hard not to take that for granted just how open and easy access to vast amounts of things has become with the advent of the internet and how people are electing to share things. Keep in mind that historically guilds and other organizations aligned to professions that kept information and shared it within an apprentice system. Now you can just boot up YouTube and get a quick tutorial on most anything. 

I’m going to call it. Our access to information is probably at a peak right now given a few things that will inevitably happen. Even the best knowledge graphs that were scaling up as all the internet content blossomed will struggle with separating current content from out of date information. Things change and even tutorial videos drop out of relevance as change occurs. Structuring your knowledge graph to be able to handle those changes in usefulness is difficult at best to sustain over time. Designing a recursive relevance function against stored graph information requires a baseline and method to establish that base. Beyond the problem of figuring out what is really the freshset information to share with people, a very real problem exists from the vast overcrowding that is occurring within the knowledge graph. Large language models are creating a scenario where more content than previously generated by humanity can be generated by an endless running prompt. Separating the real from the endless stream of synthetic content will be nearly impossible. This creates a scenario where the knowledge graph may want to be designed to favor previously created content that existed before the great flooding of information occurred online. However, the aforementioned problem of things going stale is going to occur as favoring previous content only creates freshness problems. 

That means that right now we may have the best possible access to information. We may have hit peak information and nobody is really appreciating it. At some point, curated knowledge graphs inside platforms and metaverse style realities might be the gold standard for information access. Something is probably going to change here in the next few years and it will be interesting to see how that happens. A lot of people are investing in a VR headset based version of that access and interaction. I don’t really want to login to something wholesale to experience an alternate reality. Yesterday, I walked the dog and read part of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction book about the Second Foundation (1953). That experience was perfectly satisfying. I’ll admit that during working hours I certainly sit in front of a computer screen which is less immersive, but not wholly different from being committed to a VR experience. For the most part within that working experience the world in front of me shrinks down to the content contained within the screen.