Simon Winchester on ‘Knowing What We Know’ from ancient times to AI - The Washington Post

Simon Winchester on ‘Knowing What We Know’ from ancient times to AI - The Washington Post Simon Winchester on ‘Knowing What We Know’ from ancient times to AI washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/04/knowing-what-we-know-simon-winchester-review Michael DirdaMay 4, 2023 “Knowing What We Know: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.” (Harper) Simon Winchester considers the fate of humankind when machines think for us ‘Knowing What We Know,’ the latest from the author of ‘The Professor and the Madman,’ explores the evolution of knowledge, from oral storytelling and the development of writing to digital media and AI. Review by Michael Dirda May 4, 2023 at 12:00 p.m. EDT Listen 7 min Comment Gift Article Share About halfway through his new book “Knowing What We Know,” Simon Winchester devotes several pages to a British organization, founded in 1826, called the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. By publishing inexpensive booklets on a variety of subjects, the group aimed to enlarge the intellectual horizons of the newly literate working classes of that era. In many ways, Winchester — the genial and much admired author of books about the Oxford English Dictionary, the volcanic explosion of Krakatau, the Yangtze and Mississippi rivers, geological maps, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and so much else — might be appropriately dubbed the One-Man Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge of our own era. Whatever his subject, Winchester leavens deep research and the crisp factual writing of a reporter — he was for many years a foreign correspondent for the Guardian — with an abundance of curious anecdotes, footnotes and digressions. His prose is always clear, but it is also invigorated with pleasingly elegant diction: Fashionable gentlemen might be “grandees” or “swells,” while a country’s dependent provinces are dubbed “satrapies.” Winchester also neatly enriches his sentences with sly literary allusions: The intellects of Chinese censors, he notes in this new book, are “vast and cool and unsympathetic,” which is how H.G. Wells described the minds of Martians. Above all, Winchester values precision. While many writers would be content to refer to “the Andaman Islands” and stop there, Winchester — trained in geology and the earth sciences at Oxford University — proffers a sharper geographical delineation: “the Andaman Islands, the string of lime-stoned jungle-covered skerries lying in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of Burma.” In short, he is a pleasure to read, or even to listen to, as devotees of his audiobooks can testify. In “Knowing What We Know,” Winchester surveys “how knowledge has over the ages been created, classified, organized, stored, dispersed, diffused and disseminated.” The book, nearly 400 pages along covers oral storytelling, the development of writing, the emergence of libraries in antiquity, the discovery of paper by Cai Lun in China, the Gutenberg printing press, the heyday of the encyclopedia, the rise of newspapers, radio and television, the techniques of propaganda and public relations and, finally, the digital and artificial intelligence revolutions of our own time. Do these subjects sound familiar? As a brief afterword explains, Winchester worked on the book while hunkered down in his study in western Massachusetts during the coronavirus pandemic, unable to travel for in situ research. Consequently, “Knowing What You Know” is less original than his best-selling “The Professor and the Madman” — about a convicted murderer, confined in an insane asylum, who became a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary — or “The Man Who Loved China,” an enthralling biography of the eccentric Joseph Needham, the biologist turned Sinologist who spearheaded the magisterial multivolume “Science and Civilization in China.” “Knowing What We Know” is, instead, largely a synthesis of Winchester’s extensive but focused reading, amplified with occasional short borrowings from his own magazine articles and earlier writing. Informative and entertaining throughout, it is packed tight with his usual array of striking factoids: The Rosetta Stone is the most visited object in the British Museum, Virginia Woolf reviewed Arthur Waley’s translation of “The Tale of Genji” for Vogue Magazine, announcers in the early days of BBC radio read the news in full evening dress and — those were the days! — one issue of the Sunday New York Times in 1987 clocked in at 1,600 pages and weighed roughly 12 pounds. A book review of ‘The Perfectionists’ from author Simon Winchester In a loose sense, the first half of “Knowing What We Know” supplies the background history to the overriding and more philosophical question that eventually comes to the fore in the second half of the book: What will be the fate of humankind in a world where, increasingly, machines do our remembering, thinking and creating for us? Winchester worries “that today’s all-too-readily available stockpile of information will lead to a lowered need for the retention of knowledge, a lessening of thoughtfulness, and a consequent reduction in the appearance of wisdom in society.” Himself a second-string polymathic, Winchester hero worships those people who, throughout history, have aspired to know everything or who have contributed useful innovations to multiple fields. In Western culture, Aristotle is the primary exemplar of this tradition, but “Knowing What You Know” touches on others nearly as accomplished, including the scientist Shen Gua in 11th century China, the multilingual, multitalented Black African James Beale (who later renamed himself Africanus Horton), the saintly mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and Frank Ramsey (both of whom died young), the learned classicist Benjamin Jowett, the 19th century visionary Charles Babbage, who drew up plans for an “Analytical Engine,” Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and John McCarthy, the founding father of artificial intelligence. While the above list does not include any women, largely due to the constraints imposed on them in the past, its range does underscore the global perspective of the author. For instance, one section of “Knowing What We Know” surveys the various national exams given to young people, starting with the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), now increasingly disparaged, though seldom for the reason mentioned by Winchester: “In the eyes of almost every educated country in the world, the American SAT is just ridiculously easy.” Its Chinese equivalent, the dreaded Gaokao, “is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.” A 2018 preliminary exam for 11-year-olds in the city of Shungqing tellingly featured this question: “A ship carries 26 sheep and 10 goats: How old is the captain?” One child not only calculated that the livestock weighed at least 7,7000 kilograms but knew that piloting a boat carrying more than 5,000 kilograms of cargo required its captain to have had a license for five years. One could only apply for such a license at the age of 23. Ergo, the boat captain must be at least 28 years old. Read more book reviews by Michael Dirda at The Washington Post Think of all the different kinds of knowledge that child brought to bear on this seemingly insoluble problem. Because computers can now answer our questions at a keystroke, they cannot help but encourage laziness and intellectual atrophy: As gym rats say about putting on muscle, “No pain, no gain.” Instant access to digitized information can be a useful adjunct to our daily lives, but it is still no match for the deeply human pleasure of acquiring competency, in learning how to do a difficult thing well all by oneself. Don’t we most admire those people who can perform intricate tasks, whether physical or mental, with confidence, grace and pizazz? As one Chinese girl proclaimed, learning was worth any amount of hard work “because she now had the knowledge.” Winchester ends “Knowing What We Know” with the somewhat desperate speculation — earlier enunciated by Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” — that our minds can only retain so much information. By allowing computers to function as our brain attics, we might gain the mental space and leisure “to suppose, ponder, ruminate, consider, assess, wonder, contemplate, imagine, dream” and thus become more “thoughtful, considerate, patient” and “wise.” Isn’t pretty to think so? Yet I suspect that people are too gloriously messy, too human, for this sort of austere, Utopian future, whether imagined by Plato, Wells or Winchester. In fact, all that high-minded thinking sounds more like how some bloodless and very smart computer might happily spend the livelong day. Knowing What We Know From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic By Simon Winchester. Harper. 432 pp. $35.