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Can computers really extract knowledge?
Knowledge management is theoretically impossible. Real knowledge sits between your ears, unseen until it is needed. As happened today. Someone mentioned Battenburg cake to me and all sorts of long forgotten knowledge about tea parties at my grandma's surfaced.
Not exactly a momentous bit of knowledge, but I joined a conversation on the subject on Facebook of all places. (The dyes in the cake are, apparently, dangerous.)
Recently, I visited a company that specialises in testing staff knowledge through questionnaires. The idea is to find out what an employee knows about their job and to determine whether there are any gaps that need filling or good results that need exploiting.
Boards of very large companies have rather taken to this system, a sort of asset register of the staff and their expected performance on the job. They can use it to correct weaknesses or develop strengths. And, should a crisis occurs in a particular department, they can quickly pull up staff information to help them figure out what went wrong.
Test results can also be measured against averaged results for other organisations in the same industry - a sort of performance benchmark.
It all sounds terrific in theory. The underpinning technology is fundamentally sound. But, as always, the acid test is in the implementation. And that involves humans.
By the time the strategy and raw information has found its way to the question designers, all intimacy with the subject matter will have been squeezed out. It's like speaking a foreign language. It doesn't matter how perfect your accent, a native will know you are a foreigner within a very short time.
I've just read a blog post by a member of staff at the receiving end of an assessment run by this particular system. Slightly tidied up and anonymised, he said, "The people who designed the questions and answers knew nothing about my line of work. The end result has been questions that don't make sense or which are so ambiguous that one needs to be a professor of English to understand them".
You can see why I've not mentioned the company name. I will return to it when I've tried the system myself and dug a little deeper into the particular circumstances around the above comment. But it seems clear that one important step was forgotten - did they try the questionnaires out on people who understood the subject before letting it out in the wild?
Daniel Griffin, IWR Deputy Editor
Peter Williams, IWR Editor
I guess it really comes down to your definition of the what 'knowledge' is. I think it is 'thought' that sits between our ears and knowledge itself can be quantified.
Posted by :Computer Chip Guy | April 17, 2008 4:25 PM
Hmmm. I view explicit knowledge as information because it is externalised. I'm sure there are clever people out there who have up to date views on the subject.
And I also think that thought and knowledge are different things. I suspect that thought is the mental manipulation of a mix of knowledge and information.
Any knowledge experts out there willing to pitch in?
Posted by :David Tebbutt | April 17, 2008 8:55 PM
I'm certainly no knowledge expert, but my favourite definition comes from Plato (slightly simplified): "Knowledge is how objects relate to other objects."
Your Battenburg cake "had a relation" (for you) to tea parties long gone, which again were related to your grandma. And I'm sure your train-of-relations got you think about something else pleasant related to grandma or tea. Right?
If you've never seen a coffee mug before, mugs and glasses being unknown, you would not "know" what it was. Until somebody poured liquid into it and raised it to their lips - relations to liquid and lips was established and knowledge about the cup assimilated. And the beauty abut relations is that they deliver process knowledge as well, a most import aspect - you do not "know" anything about an object unless you have the "context", where it's been and what happened to it, and how it can be used.
Funny thing, that is how children learn. Until they're in school and some misunderstood hierarchical categorising alternative becomes the "knowledge truth" and learning speed goes down the drain... but that's a discussion for another day ;)
Posted by :sig | April 17, 2008 9:28 PM
I'll argue that there's nothing instrinsically unique and unreproducible about the way in which human brains process data. There may not be any computers around today which can compare but that's a question of relative speed and sophistication rather than any fundamental qualitative difference. So there is no ultimate barrier, it just may not have been breached yet.
Posted by :Andy Roberts | April 17, 2008 9:38 PM
I'm sure you're right. But a memory dump would be their only option unless questions were asked to elicit their 'knowledge'.
A bit like the Web and Google really.
Posted by :David Tebbutt | April 17, 2008 10:07 PM
If computer chip guy really thinks that then he probably has a computer chip (or possibly the carbohydrate version) between his ears. A large part of human knowledge is learnt experience, involving not only the brain but also the hormonal and muscle system. Whole bodies of craft knowledge require practice to acquire and are evolutionary modifications of the original capability. The hippocampus of a London Taxi driver is enlarged as a result of the "knowledge". Thought is a complex process that cannot be codified.
David I am only answering this because you asked me to. Normally I ignore this level of ignorance.
Posted by :Dave Snowden | April 17, 2008 10:38 PM
Well, Dave. I appreciate you joining in. I invited you at the point when I was talking about knowledge, information and thought. We hadn't reached the thinking computer bit then.
Although I think it's kind of you to comment, please feel free to ignore my requests any time they don't suit you.
Posted by :David Tebbutt | April 17, 2008 10:58 PM
Sig's comment is one of the more popular myths of a lot of people in computing who haven't done enough basic reading. There are a whole range of qualitative differences, starting with the fact the humans do not process data in binary form, amplitude also matters as to chemicals, the hormonal and other aspects of our system. You could potentially at some time "grow" a brain, but then it would be a human. There is no way you could build one.
The question of knowledge and information is regularly debated on ActKM and we are just finishing off a flurry of posts there - some of which I have picked up on by blog
Posted by :Dave Snowden | April 18, 2008 10:27 AM