The Next Generation of War (Echoes of our Past)
Last week, I decided to take a look through old emails to look for something long forgotten. As I pulled out old drives and data I realized all that I had forgotten about. The records, the messages, the conversations, the knowledge.
A book on a shelf has bundled knowledge in plain sight but this knowledge is not actionable if you can’t read it, understand it, contextualize it, reuse it, or transform it.
Today, we can rip the words from all the books. We can rip the comments from our emails, from our OneNote, from our text files, our Word files, and anything we took a picture of. We can rip the words from our audio, our video, and anything we created. We can tap into our repositories, our data lakes, and our unstructured data. We are in the “first age of electronic intelligence.” While AI is still very rudimentary, it is like growing a pack of lion cubs in your backyard. One day, we may become dinner.
These technologies pull the data together, feeding and feeding the systems moving from synthetic data to the real thing.
Where possible, if positioned and consumed by the intelligent engine, we can string together stories that we never knew existed. We can surmise relationships that we never knew existed and we can discover and rediscover lessons from our past.
For some, this could be the discovery of cures, answers to unsolved puzzles, and breakthroughs in philosophy, science, and medicine. For others, it could end their lives as they know it. It could be a reverse minority report of sorts that offers an AI perspective of past events based on real data and algorithmic likelihood.
If we are all in our own version of “Memento” our polaroids are etched into the fabric of someone’s hard drive waiting to be recalled by an AI LLM query agent.
If data was in a lake, businesses had the potential to drown but now, things are changing. This data can now become weaponized even if we didn’t have this type of intent. Why?
How much information of business value lives in email? We could be on the verge of data fracking information out of old archives. What will we find in those messages? Cheating, lying, stealing, infractions, privacy issues, illegal activities, etc. There are so many things that live in share drives .. right?
I remember weddings, music, images, poems, and all sorts of things. What about the napkin notes that made no sense to others but were backed up and now have become part of the fold? Ahh the napkin notes.. You don’t think they exist?
In the mid-2000s we met with Col. Peter Weina while he was leading at Walter Reed Research. He said a few things that changed the way I thought about knowledge management.
- “People walking out with their hard drives, we stop them and look at the data and can’t make heads or tails of it.”
- “The cure for many diseases lives in someone’s desk draw”
- “People think the information they generate belongs to them, it doesn’t.”
These are important as we consider the implications. As you left your role 10 years ago in company x what rights do you have if any to the data and information you left on their systems. This is effectively similar to a book on a shelf. Now that AI is in the mix, what can it discover and use?
Think about all of the implications of forgotten but available data. Electronic footprints we leave everywhere we go. Think about how DNA in recent years is used to solve old mysteries. What stories will the data you left behind tell?
The internet created an opportunity to detect and discover information. This was but a small fraction of the knowledge and information which resides in data centers. It is a drop in the bucket. Google and Bing can see a sliver of a slice, a very small part of this but now inside companies, Microsoft with cognitive AI services can go well beyond yesterday’s search. It can go in with the graph.. the graph can be used in conjunction with AI services to feed language models and services, these can be processed into dialogue, and from dialogue, we can ask iterative questions and dig in.
Think about the possibilities. Corporate, personal, hackers, enemies, and active information warfare. Think about what enemies can hold over people by hacking companies or just paying to consume data and process it in their language models.
We are living in a new age. We are at the start of it, we are going well beyond discovery.
What is written on your napkin notes?
This made me think of the Paul Simon lyrics
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls…”
One of the issues with the digitization of data and the way that AI filters, biases and presents data is that it will work as an echo chamber for anyone that uses it. It will present the information that best aligns with the searchers own biases. It’s part of the problem with a lot of our political reporting and discourse. We are protected by dissenting and challenging ideas by the very outlets that we trust to provide “objective” truth. On the flip side, being deliberately incendiary gets you views and gets your message into the public view (and onto the AIs popular=true list)
Those who are in the minority or don’t have enough views or whose data isn’t sponsored or worthy of monetization will be lost in the filter and never heard from again. “Truth” will be determined by consensus and click-throughs. Entire communities will become AI-marginalized because the media doesn’t bother with them and they don’t have enough content being generated by their residents.
The words of the prophets will be lost unless an influencer with an insta deems them worthy.