THE SILICLONE
Each of us fortunate enough to have a few thousand dollars to spare has, at our fingertips, the power available only to multinationals for millions of dollars only 40 years ago. One way to realise this power is to use multimedia to create a conceptual self-portrait, a sort of expert system of oneself. The Siliclone - that is, a silicon clone of oneself - is a primitive prototype. It can be represented as a HyperCard-based filing cabinet of one's favourite quotes, anecdotes, images, sources, and so on (see Figure 3). Person-machine synergy can be explored as the appropriate division of labour between your natural intelligence and the artificial intelligence in this satellite brain, or, more precisely in my case, between Scot and Siliclone. As in any partnership, the division of labour is based on the competences of each partner.
One view of the division of labour is that Siliclone deals with content, setting Scot free to deal with context. That is, data is placed in context to yield information, information in context to yield knowledge, knowledge in context to yield understanding, understanding in context to yield - God forbid - wisdom. This is how value will be added to raw data to generate wealth in our information society. This data-wisdom hierarchy is not as clear as it seemed then. Wisdom is more of an inside-out process, based on the unfolding of the human potential in the zygote from the inside out rather than on the contextualisation of data from the outside in.
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