This book is a must read for all students caught plagiarising.
The subtitle of The Knowledge Illusion -- Why We Never Think Alone --
captures the crux of this argument by the authors, both cognitive science
professors, that humans know a lot less than they think they do, but its all
OK because humans actually think with a hive mind.
As professors also of psychology and marketing, the authors risk several
predictions after explaining how this hive mind works. One is that we need not
worry about artificial intelligence taking over any time soon, because
technology will “for the
foreseeable future miss the key element of the secret
of human success, the ability to share intentionality”.
The authors argue the web demonstrates that real super intelligence
resides in the community of individuals, not machines; and that developments
like crowd sourcing make these communities larger. By doing so, technology puts
at our disposal more and more of the world’s expertise. All we need to do is learn
to take full advantage of this community of knowledge, in which an individual
is like a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle. That sounds easy enough, but as
perhaps befit masters of the obscure arts of marketing and psychology, their
advice soon gets vague. For example: “Understanding where you fit requires
understanding not only what you know but also what others know that you don’t.
Learning your place in a community of knowledge requires becoming aware of the
knowledge outside yourself, what you don’t know that touches on what you do know.”
Such fluffery had me thinking the authors are just dressing up zeitgeist
in new terms, but Sloman and Fernbach do introduce a welcome bit of humility in
the hubris that comes with the Western culture of “ergo cogito sum” (I am
because I think) and they remind that human thought never truly belongs to any
individual alone. Which is where plagiarising students may get a fresh argument
to base their defence on.
