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Gregory R. Gromov
THE
AUTOFORMALIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Introduction
For a technology-based civilization, the speed of
development is determined to a great extent by the speed of professional
knowledge acquisition. The total amount of knowledge potentially available to
members of society at any given historical moment depends on the efficiency of
the process of separating individually generated elements of knowledge from
their primary source and initial repository, their author, who was the first to
master a particular new technological method, means, device, etc., and then widely
distributing this knowledge.
Sources of
Information Technology
At the earliest stages of civilization, professional skills
were mainly transmitted by way of personal example in performing productive
actions (new ways of hunting, or processing the skins and bones of animals,
etc.). Rational ways of organizing group actions and the synchronization of
productive efforts were reinforced in ritual dances, songs, folk-lore, and so
on, and by these means were passed from one generation to another.
In the socio-historical ‘circuit’ of professional knowledge
transfer, interference was considerably reduced with the invention of elementary
technology for the long-term physical media-based storage of a set of images
deemed most relevant to the acquired knowledge. This innovation came about quite
recently, historically speaking, some twenty to thirty thousand years ago, when
the first cave art appeared. Human civilization was already several hundred
thousand years old by the time.
Six thousand years ago the technology for recording on a
material medium character-based information pertaining to the acquired knowledge
reached a level where we can identify an era of written language. Over the
course of some twenty thousand years, human civilization came all the way from
cave paintings to producing clay boards with texts on them. This was the first
step in finding more sophisticated methods for coding, interpreting, and storing
elements of knowledge on a material medium.
The search for ever-better information-carrying media and
tools for data recording began at that time and continues today—from stone to
bone, wood, clay, papyrus, silk, paper, luminophores, magnetic and optical
media, silicon, magnetic bubble domains, etc.
However, professional knowledge collected as distinct
records or books had no way of directly influencing production processes. In
order to have a chance of inspiring a new discovery or affecting production
processes carried out by other people, the book had to be lucky enough to
attract the attention of a reader who then, by a most rare coincidence, also
happened to have been primed by previous experience and thus capable to respond
by conceiving a new idea in the given field of professional knowledge. In other
words, only in this rare, almost improbable case when the author of the book and
one of the scant number of readers of this expensive, bound manuscript achieved
a constructive resonance could the book contribute to the birth of a new element
of knowledge. In this context it is clear what a great impact on technological
civilization the invention of the printing-press had, being as it was a machine
for publishing knowledge recorded on a material medium.
Book-Printing as
the First Information Revolution
In the growth of professional knowledge accumulated by
mankind, book-printing played a role similar to the spreading of seeds. Newfound
knowledge, recorded on a material medium and widely circulated over great
distances, increased considerably the probability that at least one of these
‘seeds’ of knowledge would find fertile ground, maturing and, in turn,
dispersing its own message for the future, itself enriched and enhanced by new
knowledge.
Stimulated by book-printing, science’s development made for
quicker accumulation of field-specific knowledge. It was now possible to rapidly
circulate this knowledge and make it available at specialized production sites
and facilities, which were more often than not considerably removed from one
another in space or time. For instance, when the steam engine was designed, the
main technical solutions were discoveries by Denis Papin, a physician (1690),
Ivan Polzunov, a shift-leader at Kolyvano-Voznesensky factories (1763), and
James Watt, a laboratory assistant at the University in Glasgow (1769}.
Friedrich Engels considered the steam engine to be the first truly international
invention.
In the three centuries after the printing-press’s invention
in 1445, there was the accumulation of a critical mass of publicly-available
knowledge, which brought on the avalanche of changes that was called the industrial
revolution.
Knowledge, materialized through labor in the production of
machines, instruments, new technological processes, and other technical and
managerial innovations became a source of new ideas and productive scientific
trends. A regenerative cycle began—knowledge informing industrial production,
which in turn generated knowledge—and the tightly-knit circle of technological
society began to expand with ever-increasing speed. At the beginning of this
process, the printing-press was an open valve on the wellsprings of information,
drastically increasing the throughput capacity of the public exchange of
knowledge.
_______________ "Autoformalisation - Knowledge acquisition of professional skills" by Gregory Gromov, Microprocessor Devices & Systems, Moscow, 1986, N 3, p.80--91, Chapter 1
Copyright © 1986-2011 Gregory Gromov
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