Comment by thorum 10 days ago
It’s pretty amazing that we’re almost at the point where a single laptop computer with no internet connection can contain (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge and (2) an intelligence that can explain it to you.
> applied sciences that are required for modern advanced technology.
Where would you find this?
That’s a great business idea: sell a laptop survival kit for tough times.
A USB stick with all public domain content would be amazing. New one each year; loads of stuff on it!
You'd need a full size SSD (hundreds of terabytes), not a USB stick (2 terabytes today).
I actually really like this idea.
Choose some reasonably good llm model + corpus of data to enhance the generation (e.g. wikipedia).
Package it in a long-lasting battery, rough device. Think of a tablet/laptop you would take deep into the desert for a multi-week trip.
A solar panel would be capable of charging a laptop. Perhaps one of those could be ruggedized along with the package.
(2) assumes technology not in evidence, unless you have a really low threshold of "explain it to you".
Like, "explains it as well as a person who doesn't know anything about it but is reading the wikipedia page".
Like, "explains it but lies, and when you catch them at it, insists that they weren't lying".
Like, "can't actually do math, but has had heard lots of math problems so they guess and hope you don't check on them".
A sleazy marketer's idea of "explains it to you".
> (1) most of humanity’s recorded knowledge
A lot of historical information on the Internet only scrape the top 50% of the knowledge on niche subjects, if even that. So often I see forum requests along the lines of "can someone scan page 242 of book X please".
It would be very interesting to package this as a machine to be deployed into the field without any supporting tech infrastructure. Picture an epoxy cube with a connection for a speaker, a microphone and power. And maybe a serial port. There’s no network connection because it’s designed to be off the grid and last for decades
With a big friendly cover and the words "Don't Panic!"
This reminds me of how the Cuban people get a weekly distillation of the internet from an external hard drive that gets passed around.
https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...
It's very far from all the humanity's accumulated knowledge. Wikipedia is but a digest of of the deeper end of science, and barely scratches the applied sciences that are required for the modern advanced technology.
To preserve a copy of the humanity's recorded knowledge, you'd have to keep a copy of the library of Congress + archives of all scientific journals + arxiv.org, and equivalents of it for other languages, like Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi,.. Then there is a ton of proprietary and sometimes secret information held by companies and crucial for their functioning.