What if we could have a real conversation with our very own thoughts, knowledge and ideas?
It’s unimaginable at first. It would, however, be a serious and meaningful breakthrough towards vastly increased human productivity. A large number of innovations in a wide variety of fields would go hand in hand with this, since this form of cognitive capability has never existed in humans before. It would be a completely new “tool of thought” — alongside text or language. As humans, we “program” our brains via language — thoughts are text-based objects that flow through a human brain and that’s also how we access them. Now, your own thoughts and knowledge would be able to speak directly back to you — as if they were alive themselves.
Let’s take a look at why I came to this conclusion and what such a cognitive capability would look like.
Many people record information and knowledge in one way or another, both traditionally with pen and paper, digitally in note-taking apps or perhaps as audio recordings. The question arises: “Why do we write such notes at all?” A generic answer can be: “To externalize our knowledge and thoughts, and especially to not forget them.”
This external placement also allows us to physically manifest and interact with our knowledge and thoughts in the world — a type of interaction that would not be possible purely “in the mind”. It’s an external look at our knowledge and thoughts — and is an impressive fact that becomes more and more astonishing the more you think about it. Einstein said it before: “My pen and I are smarter than I am.”
The challenge, however, is to actually use this externalized knowledge and these externalized thoughts — to make them productive. Many apps today start at this point, as more and more people are becoming aware of this weakness of our current “note-taking culture” and knowledge work.
There are apps that generate a knowledge graph from the bidirectional connections between the notes created or that try to proactively display context-relevant notes to the user. In addition, there are various views, filters and dashboards in these apps to display the information as required. Thankfully, the search capabilities in note-taking apps have gotten so good that searching can be done in near real-time.
Still, in all of these cases, the human needs to reactively use the note-taking app, knowing that something of value is “there” for a given case or context, and look for it — and find it. A big hurdle or an effort that should not be underestimated. In addition, this actual interaction with knowledge and thoughts costs a lot of cognitive energy.
In principle knowledge or a thought must first of all be actively recorded. We’ve already overcome this hurdle with relative success — most note-taking apps offer a variety of options for capturing information ranging from text, photos, videos, audio to handwriting and scans.
In addition, there are other notes that I call passive notes. These are such notes that are recorded automatically. And by this I don’t just mean text, images or audio recordings — in other words, no classic notes — but basically all data that can be assigned individually to a person. A good example of this is data that a fitness tracker like the Apple Watch collects, eg. movement data and other activity data. More and more of such passive notes or information are being recorded. In principle, we can assume that in the near future all data and information that we come into contact with or that we generate ourselves will be digitally stored and thus become usable.
So what would it be like to be able to speak with this data, information and notes that we collect and create?
My vision is an Personal AI Assistant (let’s call it Paia). Paia understands our externalized knowledge and thoughts and enables us to interact with them in a completely new way. Paia would eventually know all the data and information we interacted with. Paia is like a super version of Siri, but fed only with our own thoughts, our own knowledge, and our data and information. And I think that such a version might not be that far away.
To remind you: language and text shape our thoughts and our knowledge enormously. I understand thoughts (or contemplation) as actively dealing with a given situation or context, and knowledge as existing knowledge about the world that one has built up through internalized and connected data and information. Thoughts, knowledge, information and data are basically stored as text in our brain or we access them via text and speech. In the same way, we program ourselves via language and thus control our cognitive abilities and thoughts. Language, therefore, is the programming language we use to operate our brain (the hardware). (Note: In the article, the terms data, information, thoughts and knowledge are sometimes only mentioned individually, although the whole spectrum of content in our brain is meant.)
The first step is to provide Paia with all the data and our knowledge. Specifically, it would mean that Paia can read all this data from our notes, apps, smartphones, smartwatches and other “data generators” via an interface. If we write a note in our note-taking app, Paia knows it immediately. If we make a phone call in which we are told something, Paia knows this information. If we take a picture, Paia knows it. If we talk to a colleague, Paia listens carefully and knows the content of the conversation. Paia always has an exact overview of all our individual data.
Paia is a personal assistant that walks with you through life as if it was invisible and automatically saves and stores everything for you in a structured way — and thus plays to the strengths of a computer. To the outside, Paia is a language interface that was placed over our data and information. Paia must therefore actually be able to understand information and knowledge. With Paia we can fully focus on “thinking” and generating new knowledge and thus advancing ourselves as humans and humanity.
Never again do we have to think about where we put which note or where we recorded some information. Any knowledge that we once created and scribbled somewhere will stay available forever. We can just ask Paia. Especially, we wouldn’t have to search for it reactively, Paia would point us to an existing note all by itself at exactly the right moment. In addition, we can use Paia above all as a working partner. We can discuss ideas and develop new suggestions with Paia — and for the very first time actually access our individual, complete knowledge, nothing is forgotten or left unconsidered.
It means that, for the first time in human history, we are creating real simplicity in how we interact and use data, information and knowledge — and this will revolutionize knowledge work. Especially in today’s world, when we are rather struggling with an information overload, Paia will herald a new era. Paia will become the buffer to data and information. At some point in the future, people will only have to do knowledge work, everything else will be taken care of by computers and robots — and an assistant like Paia is even more important.
In the same way, Paia is also a real “second brain” — Paia is a reflection of our cognitive self and never forgets anything — in return Paia can never generate real new information, let alone new knowledge. While Paia can show “new” information, it’s not actually new — that information was already present in the data and we just couldn’t see it. For real new knowledge, we come back into play as humans and remain indispensable forever. Paia will point out connections that we might never have discovered again. In this way, Paia will enormously increase the generation of knowledge by humans — and will initiate the revolution I mentioned at the beginning of the article.