Towards an exocortex.
20240102Z
The asymptotic limit of an exocortex is a fully general external intelligence. Thus, the development of a notetaking system limits to the development of an ASI. This can be seen in the transition between static and dynamic personal knowledge bases: at minimum, a PKB utilizes a single, a priori organizational schema. The introduction of multiple schemae, and transformations atop schemae, the contents of data within them, or the generation of metadata, create the possibility of affordances for non-local/non-obvious interactions, almost invariably so as the size of the content base increases, even allowed only simple dynamic rules. This is the standard formula of a weird machine, or emergent language, that then must be tamed with formalisms, and correspondingly formally extended to enable intentional further complexipotency.
I therefore take the position that the meta-design of an exocortex must be a process amenable to process, that is, continual revision, as the minimum viable product intensifies. This may be expected to percolate to the object level design in various, but invarious, ways, such that any particular exocortex instantiation ought contain some method of revision of structure. Other desiderata, mechanisms to achieve them, and candidate technologies are, not exhaustively, as follows:
Desiderata:
Epistemology oriented notetaking, that foregrounds the lifecycle of content revision - annotating what became known in what order, in relation to what else, and how a body of knowledge has come to adopt its current form.
Mechanism:
Three dimensional content - the height of an artifact grows as material is appended, its width as it accrues relations with other artifacts, and depth as it is revised. The entire PKB, at all feasible levels of granularity, ought be accessible throughout this volume of artifact state space.
Technology:
Multitemoporal database (xtdb) - first class support for multiple views on the content of a given artifact.
[To be continued.]