As we look out on the world, trying to understand it, we structure our knowledge of the information collected, across several dimensions.
Dimensions of Knowledge
Spatial, temporal, static, dynamic, and reflect the organization of the information in our theories and experiments. We aim to make them reliable and reproducible, to serve as a firm basis for the implementation of solutions, engineered to help us achieve our goals.
The introduction of digital mapping and mobile phones equipped with routing apps using high resolution GPS data, changed the way we move around, set up and show up at meetings, perceive a foreign city we are visiting for the first time.
The biological world has been mapped to a variable degree, and the granularity of this description informs and limits our understanding of it, as well as our capacity to act.
Pushed by the current pandemic, we are going to supercharge our efforts to gain a real time view of what viruses and bacteria are circulating, rapidly testing and deciding how to react to them. In the course of a few years, we will produce and install sensors both in wearables but also in the environment, that will implement a new internet of things at the molecular level.
And our attitudes will change with the availability of this new knowledge. We will look back to today with astonishment of how ignorant we were about our individual state of health as well as about how negligent society has been in accepting it.