(Crossposted from https://olickel.com/southbridge)

Let's go down and confuse them! We'll make them speak different languages, and they won't be able to understand each other.[1]

The early internet had a problem.

ARPANET and TCP/IP let us send packets between computers, but connecting networks of machines to each other caused a never-ending cascade of packets flooding the network, bringing everything to a screeching halt. Termed ‘congestion collapse’, it seemed an intractable problem at the time.

In 1988, Van Jacobson devised a brilliant solution to this problem that made the modern internet - a collection of billions of smaller networks, like the one you have at home - possible. All of those networks could be complex and varied in their own ways, and yet find a way to be part of a single, large substrate of extended knowledge.

Humans are complex and varied. We speak similar but different languages, generate similar but different data - and this is a problem for computers. Even the same human will find it hard to reproduce things exactly. We think in the spirit of things, and computers measure letter-first.

Once you see it, you’ll notice that a large share of humanity works on transforming information from one shape to another. Our governments, companies, and people spend untold amounts of money and time simply reformatting data.

This is going to be one of the problems that define this decade. Through no fault of our own but our very nature (and the occasional attempt at making walled gardens), the information we’ve been saving for decades now is in silos made of trillions of schemas. (A schema is just a fun way to say structure or shape).

As a younger man I looked at solving human problems in shipping and insurance, yet my time (which is now the better part of a decade) was mostly spent cleaning and unifying data siloes. This was the problem to be solved before there was any foundation to solve other problems.

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I will wager that we all waste time solving this problem - repeatedly. Running our "monthly" budget at home (I want to say monthly, but we actually do it once every six months) demands heroic efforts to consolidate information from multiple banks and accounts. And this is just to get three simple columns: transaction name, date, and amount. ‘Running a budget’ often is just transforming data from one format to another.

This is a problem that crosses the personal/professional boundary for all of us.

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Humans have - until now - been alone in our world as the only universal connector. We are beings capable of learning and understanding completely new schemas and unifying them through experience. It takes general intelligence to infer relationships, unify fuzzy similarities and see meaning across formats.

Since 2022, we aren’t the only Mentats on this planet. We have company - we have help.