Umberto Eco called the encyclopedia “the shared knowledge” of a cultural community.
After the multimedia encyclopedias of the 1990s, came the era of the search engine, and ultimately the World Wide Web itself, which can also be called “shared knowledge.”
After 20 years in which Google searches gave access to knowledge, it is now generative artificial intelligence that draws on the entire body of knowledge from the digital sources available On Line, and is thus also substantiated by “shared knowledge” in the 1920s era of the 21st century.
ChatGPT’s oracular judgments do not in fact express a strictly artificial or alien intelligence, but a real-time reworked synthesis of human knowledge, on a probabilistic basis, in response to specific queries (the Prompts): thus such a synthesis is in some sense an expression of humanity’s knowledge, shared and published on the Web.
But knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Knowledge is power, no doubt. But to decide how to use it, power, it takes more than knowledge or intelligence, it also takes wisdom, and, as far as it appears to date, this is a different, typically human area.
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