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More experienced (aka older) readers might recall the Knowledge Management movement of the 1990s and 2000s. In short, better tagging and organizing of data would make finding and applying knowledge easier and be a competitive advantage. Turns out those pesky human workers didn’t cotton to the idea of sharing their knowledge into a database for the common good … judging that organizations would likely cut them once they finished sharing. Its really hard to blame them or argue with that logic given the now non-stop layoffs, or should I say “impacted positions” to use the current corporate-speak.
As regular readers know, I’m on the skeptic end of the continuum about LLMs as “AI” and worry that the hype is far outpacing the delivery. But one area that is really promising is, tah dah: knowledge management. It’s really good at it … already. Granted we still have the same fear – and again very warranted – that jobs will be cut by the implementation of AI-based knowledge management. AI can really help us know what the organization knows. Remember the old adage “if Xerox only knew what Xerox knew.” Well, now it can. To be clear, I am not celebrating using it to impact jobs. And in the public applications, scraping the web, and repackaging it as an AI overview is dodgy if not outright unethical … but it is still amazing. Done ethically, in After Capitalism, we see a future with a knowledge commons that works in this context. NOTE: There was some discussion in the early days of Generative AI of making it all publicly available for free … but that passed.
Knowledge management is a good concept. AI is a good tool for it. It is cool. Alas, we ought to apply our concepts and tools wisely for the benefit of all, but that is not the current trajectory. — Andy Hines
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