Agricultural Age, Industrial Age, Knowledge Age.
May I suggest, Anthony, that the "given" (..."movement toward the
Knowledge Age,...) may be a weakness in your analogical progression.
I don't know it for sure--I'm just raising that possibility.
Agriculture is in one way an applied science. Industrial production, too,
can be, and has been, made into a science. Yes, there's a science of
knowledge, but there's a side of knowledge which makes it so vastly
different, in my opinion, from the eras you list.
That's because knowledge is captured, transformed or synthesized, and
communicated from our complex brains. There are deep, dark and mysterous
interplays whose manifestations to other humans are but low hills on a
vast continent.
I suggest this is not the case with arable land use or natural pesticides
or crop yields. Sure, genetics in its relative toddlerhood holds vast
secrets. But the secret is in the germ, so to speak. Agriculture may be
transformed yet again by what you name the Knowledge Age. Nor is it the
case with machines of production, chaos of a billion interacting parts
notwithstanding.
Your questions are valid. How do we measure knowledge? Whew! I won't go
near that one yet. I wanna watch some others jump into the ring.
Sharing? Recent postings are dancing with that one.
To sum up, it is my opinion that the human mind is not as delimited or
delimiting as most of us habitually accept when we're not thinking about
it. A fable:
Once there was a dot who lived in a two-dimensional world of a plane.
This dot could see the others dots on the plane. Then one morning, as the
plane lightened from the east, the dot, instead of yawning, decided to do
something else. It did what you and I call jumping. That activity was
heretofore unknown to the dot--there was not vocabulary for it; neither
grammar nor syntax.
With a jump and a jolt, the dot rose above its plane, and for an instant
observed a world of 3 dimensions, then fell back to its plane. "Holy
Paper!" it shouted. Dots gathered immediately. "I just saw the most
amazing thing! There's another way to 'move' that's not just 'this way'
and 'that way'. I don't know how to describe it. It's...it's..."
"Sure," said another dot. "You must have had a white out, or something."
"Yup," agreed another. Others chimed in, "Yup, yup."
"YUP! That's what I'll call it," hallucinated the dot in the center of
the circle. "YUp! I went...no! I'll call it UP!"
Slowly the circle dispersed across the plane, leaving the dot alone,
chilled, pale. No one believed the dot, that there could be another,
"third" dimension somewhere "up". This dot never jumped again.
How many are we in? Three? Four? Anybody jumping out there? Satisfied
with current explanations? Do we have knowledge pegged?
-- Happy hopping, Barry Mallis bmallis@markem.com