What do you think about information overload?

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There are way too many interesting and fascinating things coming up every single day, and to catch even a tiny bit of it is hard and it consumes so much time and energy. This flood of information, no matter how important it is, exhausts and consumes the individual, and still, necessary and crucial things are missed.

I don't have a number on how many research papers or science articles are published worldwide every single day, and if one also includes the pre-prints, the number is countless.

Even mathematically it is impossible to grasp everything from this perspective! And this structure/system is also hindering the rate of progress of science and research.

It is said that almost all research papers are never cited by another paper. That's the enormous amount being produced!! And it happens worldwide. This means, most of the academic research does not contribute much to push forward the frontiers. We lack breakthrough or essential research, because it's not just about research itself alone, but also what the research is about. The focus has been more on producing quantity than quality and getting the name on a piece of paper, which is really disheartening.

However, there's a practical side to it. There is useful research and then there is useless or name-sake research, but sadly, this is in-built into science itself complicating the whole ecosystem... We can't know beforehand what will be worthy and what won't, but still, I think, in many cases, maybe we can get a decent idea prior to investing the resources, but again, it's very subjective and debatable.

For more on this, you can check the book "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" by Abraham Flexner.

And of course, there's politics and competition and lack of funds, especially in the area of fundamental sciences which (unlike technology or product-market) don't directly or in other words quickly help or take forward the advancement of human civilisation. Academicians and researchers are over-burdened with administration jobs and too much paperwork leads to less time and boldness for personal projects, creative or diverse thinking, and trying out risky experiments. This is understandable, as this is how society is. Money talks and drives everything, and now Biology (Psychology and Evolution) is involved.

The need is for a complete rejuvenation of the entire system of how the community functions. It will require a genuine collective effort from all sets of the society to live together sustainably with nature and speed up the process of progress in all fields.

So what do you think the solution is?

One thing is to make machines do all the tasks. In future, AI will also be writing research papers for real. People are actually working on this, it's inevitable and the progress rate will skyrocket!! This will be extremely helpful, once it comes to reality. It will change & revolutionise science and research for good.

The major question people who criticise or are not positive about this ask, is that, won't AI make humans lazy? But that's the same thing everyone worried about before technology boomed. However, yes, it is our responsibility to not let technology take over us, and make use of it in an efficient and good manner. Moreover, laziness is in-built into all organisms, isn't it? I mean, Biologically.

Also, in a decade or so, Universal Basic Income will become a much more common term (some nations have already started experimenting with it). Jobs will keep on reducing as machines will keep replacing people, so all everyone has to do is chill and relax. They can pursue their hobbies or just eat & sleep. Again, in the long run, this is inevitable for obvious reasons.

Coming back to academia, AI has the potential to do theoretical and computational research on its own without human interference. All that big data, neural networks and deep learning stuff... It will be faster and since it has way more processing capacity than the human brain, it'll try out so many use cases and possibilities, and all that can be done through parallel processing. It's in its very early stage but again inevitable and actually beneficial.

AI will push forward especially the field of Mathematics and Computer Science, writing its own code and bringing at least some aspects of all those sci-fi movies to be true.

It'll decide its own research questions or maybe some initial human input will be there, and then by going through all the papers available on the internet (since information overload is not a thing for an AI), it'll better be able to correlate stuff and figure out conclusions.

To understand better how the correlation of old stuff will create new stuff, you can check out my latest podcast "What is Originality?".

So returning to the original question of information overload, for humans, it might still be an active issue until we achieve brain-computer interface which is a very far-fetched idea, very much possible and likely to be a success in future but for now, I can't think of a solution that can be applied or be brought into existence right now.

Let me and other readers know if you can figure something out and provide some revolutionary ideas to the whole world!

We will be waiting.