IV123 - Future of Informatics: AN ESSAY ON KNOWLEDGE OF IGNORANCE AN ESSAY ON KNOWLEDGE OF IGNORANCE

Every question or keyword we put into the search field of Google and every question we write in a discussion forum reveal something we would like to know. So, that implies it shows a very small part of our nescience, or rather ignorance. The manner of our web usage also provides interesting data about our knowledge and our nescience. The digital track contains much information which can be helpful when we want to reconstruct someone's ignorance – “complement of someone's knowledge“. In this essay I would like to point out some important aspects of gathering and reasoning about someone's ignorance, suggest some related ethical issues to solve and show how these findings can be useful when building a “smarter world“ for everyone. Introduction Today's society is often called knowledge-based society or society of knowledge. Knowledge society is typically understood to be an opposite of the industrial society. Several years ago Konrad P. Liessmann pointed out that this difference is rather imaginary: in fact we deal with information or knowledge in the industrial manner today. Regardless of these approaches we can say that knowledge plays a very important role in many aspects of our life and it is a keystone of our civilization. Despite this the notion knowledge society became nearly a buzzword. Knowledge management became popular in the corporate environment in the last twenty years. Global companies have usually implemented very sophisticated tools for gathering, storage and retrieval of desired pieces of knowledge. These tools allow anyone inside the company to access the (explicit) knowledge of members of different teams in the company and share own knowledge with others – for example, enterprise wiki-based systems are widely used for this purpose. Other software tools inspired by social networks can help employees to find someone who has some necessary knowledge for solving certain problem. Companies also quickly set up relevant strategies, rules and processes how to deal with employee's knowledge. The main objective of such practices is (usually) to improve the performance of the company, provide a competitive advantage and facilitate the innovation process. Knowledge which was formerly distributed among many members of an institution is suddenly available to anyone en bloc. Thus, individuals can flexibly use the whole knowledge of the team. If we incorporate the the terminology of multiagent systems and epistemic logics, we can roughly say that distributed knowledge is “being converted“ into a knowledge of concrete group of agents. If we thing about these principles and tools, we will probably notice one interesting – and not obvious – fact: these systems are used for dealing with “positive knowledge“, for example: Employee A knows that employee B has some experience with Oracle databases. Everyone in our department knows that customers buy usually books about PHP programming and Apache server administration together etc. In the terms of epistemic logic we can say that negation (if used) does not stand before modal operators of knowledge (only inside of “prepositional“ subformulae). It is natural – it is a first