D=6πηrkB​T​

As an engineer I think this is an important statement, said by a person who’d know. Reference charts, libraries, indexes, the internet, etc. I can’t recall the Stokes-Einstein equation off the cuff, but I can google it. I worry though, that the algorithmic, chat bot, AI, future is giving this concept the run around.

I have had the feeling that pretty much all scientific knowledge, all frontiers, all explorative venture either physical or intellectual, has been if not exhausted but atleast outlined. I’m not going to discover the Higgs, or NewNewtonian physics. We’re just working out the kinks. I could move to Alaska, but theres no more new world, no gold rushes. And I won’t see the mars colonization in my lifetime. So I must sit in the murk of a known world.

And with the internet I have access to the culmination of all human knowledge at the tip of my fingers. And so it poses an interesting and counter intuitive behavior. One I fear is accelerating. Since everything is known, and available, why bother personally learning anything?

It is one thing to have an engineering problem, and pull from your shelf a reference book, and flip to the page needed. That is what Einstein meant I think. It is entirely another to not own the book, or bother reading it, and instead asking a chat bot to interpret it for you. Giving yourself as little possible exposure to knowledge as you can. Separating your brain and effort from retention and application of fact. If everyone is an endless receptacle of expertise, then no one is. Why bother learning, internalizing, anything. Why become an expert.

I see it in how the AI revolution is unfolding in the work place and academia. I see it in myself. I see it in younger generations especially. Who can watch a 30 second clip on construction design choices but not name a brand of concrete. Who has seen images of space systems in orbit, but can’t do basic algebra. You used to need to know one, to get to the other. No longer. Jump straight to the completed item.

It is unfortunately Kafkaesque. And that unfortunately is just a term I know, from media. I’ve never read his work or a literary dissection of his ideas. It is a self defeating self bureaucracy. It is the MVD-ing of your own intellect. Instead of going up to the counter, asking a question, and being shown a directory. It is an endless algorithm of endless counters, and when you finally reach an answer, you use and dispose of it. Fact as single use plastic forks. You gain nothing, build no repertoire of your own. Gaining no, once held in absolute reverence, experience.

You will be able to know anything, and won’t.

You will know nothing, and be happy.