The human knowledge that AI cannot access

[Celerity]

Holes in the web

Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too

https://aeon.co/essays/generative-ai-has-access-to-a-small-slice-of-human-knowledge


Boomtown; signs for computer companies in Bangalore, India, 12 March 1996. Photo by Jean-Marc Giboux/Liaison



A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor in Western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in traditional remedies. Having grown up in a small town in India, I am accustomed to rituals. My dad had a ritual too. Every time we visited his home village in southern Tamil Nadu, he’d get a bottle of thick, pungent, herb-infused oil from a vaithiyar, a traditional doctor practising Siddha medicine. It was his way of maintaining his connection with the kind of medicine he had always known and trusted.

Dad’s tumour showed signs of being malignant, so the hospital doctors and my sister strongly recommended surgery. My parents were against the idea, worried it could affect my dad’s speech. This is usually where I come in, as the expert mediator in the family. Like any good millennial, I turned to the internet for help in guiding the decision. After days of thorough research, I (as usual) sided with my sister and pushed for the surgery. The internet backed us up.

We eventually got my dad to agree and even set a date. But then, he slyly used my sister’s pregnancy as a distraction to skip the surgery altogether. While we pestered him every day to get it done, he was secretly taking his herbal concoction. And, lo and behold, after several months the tumour actually shrank and eventually disappeared. That whole episode definitely earned my dad some bragging rights.

At the time, I dismissed it as a lucky exception. But recently I’ve been wondering if I was too quick to dismiss my parents’ trust in traditional knowledge, while easily accepting the authority of digitally dominant sources. I find it hard to believe my dad’s herbal concoctions worked, but I have also since come to realise that the seemingly all-knowing internet I so readily trusted contains huge gaps – and in a world of AI, it’s about to get worse.

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