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>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any universit
by dTal 5y ago
>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves.
Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials?
This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoFair enough. A very large portion of catalogue-able knowledge? Or orders more than was available before within a few seconds in your hands.
- Jensson 5y ago> Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> > Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? > If you include pirating sites? Or...just Google’s own collection: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en