One of the things I found most interesting about this week was our discussion of the GI and the implications of having one in our society. When thinking about the GI the first thing that it reminded me of was not the web or Wikipedia, but instead the Multivac from Asimov’s short stories. The parallels are astonishing in the way that they both contain information about practically everything, and while GI doesn’t provide answers in the same way that the Multivac does, they are both a fundamental structure around which the societies are based, and without them the worlds upon which they are based would fall into chaos. And while the GI does not provide obvious, clear answers to questions in the same way that the Multivac does, its plethora of information and the manner in which people may access it to gain new information is a way of allowing the individual to make an informed decision about their question based on the provided information.
Another interesting aspect of the GI is in the fact that it provides raw data, or knowledge, with which people can do whatever they chose. And while the GI system works well for the peoples in Delaney’s book, it could cause serious problems in our world today. One of the biggest reasons it would cause problems is that while it provides knowledge, most notably on other cultures, it does not provide any platform on which one might begin to understand the other cultures. Thus, while one might assume that the GI would lead to less conflict by facilitating a greater understanding of other cultures, it would have the potential to cause more conflicts. This is due to the fact that each person who obtains new knowledge does so with a bias which they formed throughout their life experiences, and thus the knowledge they acquire is biased. And because of this bias, any attempt to understand would be clouded by opinions and biases, and would thus never become pure understanding. This biased understanding is evident in some of the issues of today, particularly in people’s fears of Islam. Due to the commonality between many of the people who perform acts of terror, many Americans have become afraid of the Islamic religion, and are thus biased against a large portion of the world’s population. With this fear, many people chose to educate themselves on the religion, to a certain extent, and while the unbiased individual might see how accepting and peaceful the religion actually is, those biased individuals found information that was in keeping with their biases. And some people used this new biased understanding to justify acts of terror against innocent Muslims, being fuelled by their lack of understanding. Thus, while GI seems to work well in Delaney’s world, it would most likely lead to more chaos in our world due to the stark difference between knowledge and true understanding.