As just about everyone does these days, when I want to know the weather I look at the weather app on my phone that not only tells me if it will rain but when and for how long, the current temperature, how high the temperature will get and when, sunrise and sunset times, humidity and pollen level, and whether it’s a good time for my run. All this on an hour by hour forecast for my specific geographical location. Totally indispensable! The other day browsing online I came across another weather app that people raved about. This peeked my curiosity, was I missing out on an even better weather app? I went to the app store and downloaded it to my phone, while in the app store I also looked around to see if there were any other marvelous weather apps that I had missed and surely enough I found another candidate with high ratings that I quickly downloaded. Now armed with not one but three weather apps I was ready, my plan was to compare them over a few days to determine which was best. To my dismay however I found that these three apps gave me considerably different current conditions and weather predictions — I went from knowing what to expect down to the hour to not knowing whether it was going to be sunny or rain or when to go for my morning run. Not wanting to fall prey to the old adage – a man with two watches doesn’t know what time it is – I decided to purge the new apps, the apparent source of all my confusion. Now once again, right or wrong, I have an undisputed forecast telling me what to expect from the weather and when to go for my run. I don’t know that this app is the most accurate, but to avoid what appeared to be a total inability to know what weather to expect, I decided to eliminate two apps and keep just one.

Unfortunately nowadays this type of confusion happens on a daily basis.

When I go online to buy a new product I diligently look at the reviews, how many stars does this product have? Being careful, I make sure it has a reasonable number of reviews and I don’t just look at the average star rating but click to check out the star rating distribution. It’s common to find that a number of customers have given the product a 5 star rating along with raving reviews side by side with customers who give it a 1 or 2 star rating with comments like “Don’t waste your money!” and “Worse product I ever bought”. So a purchase that seemed like a no brainer when the ad came across my screen has now turned into an agonizing decision.

When stock investors want to research market conditions to see if it’s a good time to buy and whether the market is expected to advance, they can easily find the answers. In fact they can find any answer they wish. There are experts who present good reasons why the market is currently overvalued and due for a fall. There are also other equally qualified experts telling us why the market is strong and expected to continue to grow. And then there are those experts who tell us that the market will be volatile for the foreseeable future, tread with caution and stick with high quality investments. Whatever you wish to do, buy, sell or stay put there are well qualified experts supporting your decision!

During unusual times, as we’ve seen with the COVID 19 pandemic, deciding what to do becomes even more critical and difficult. Do masks help stop the spread of the virus? Is it safe to socialize in small groups? Does 3 feet or 6 feet distancing, or more, keep you safe? Should children go back to school or attend classes online? Or should we simply forget safety measures and simply look forward to natural herd immunity? If we do, how long will the immunity last? Searching through the daily pandemic literature we can find answers to all of these questions, supporting and defying all possible choices.

In his 1941 short story, The Library of Babel, the noted writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges tells us about the Universe, which he says some call the Library. This Library is made up of an indefinite number of hexagonal shaped rooms, inhabited by men he calls the imperfect librarians.  Each hexagon contains an equal number of books, no two books are identical. The books consist of all possible combinations of the 22 letters in the alphabet plus the space, comma and period characters (the reason for the reduced alphabet is explained elsewhere by Borges). The library houses all that has ever been written, all that could have been written and all that will ever be written including of course a catalogue for the Library along with thousands of false catalogues. Borges tells us that the men were overjoyed when they realized that the Library was complete and contained all the information in the world: past, present and future (here you can try your luck as an imperfect librarian with an online version of the Library of Babel created by Jonathan Basile, enter your favorite passage to see where it resides in the Library).

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of the information age, building our very own Library of Babel. We already possess an indefinite amount of information on almost any subject, including accurate, inaccurate and plain false information. Still, our ability to collect, store and process information continues to grow at an exponentially accelerating pace thanks to ongoing technological advances.

While our information age Library is still under construction, we can already find parallels with Borges’ Library. In Borges’ Library, the pages of books were filled with permutations of the 25 characters, and so a lot of the Library contents appeared to be nonsense. Borges tells us of men that thought it best to eliminate the useless books by searching them out and discarding entire shelves. But since the library was indefinite in size any book destruction had insignificant impact; for each book destroyed there always remained several thousand imperfect copies. In our information age Library, we ask Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to remove information that we believe to be incorrect or harmful or in some other way useless. Worse yet, we ask these companies to determine what content needs to be removed since as a society we don’t have any official guidance. These companies are asked to operate like the men who were sent to destroy useless content. Yet no matter how much “useless” information is removed, the internet is a vast and growing place and we can most likely always locate similar versions of any content removed.

In Borges’ Library of Babel, the men of the library eventually became despondent as they realized that while the Library contained precious information, finding the necessary information seemed hopeless. Much like the feeling one gets when, for example, researching market trends. Are we subject to the same discontent as the imperfect librarians in knowing that, while all information is available, the answers we seek seem to be getting harder and harder to find?

We have not always been in this predicament, this overwhelming amount of information is a relatively new phenomenon. In the past we tended to be information poor and when we did get it there tended to be, right or wrong, one source of “truth”. Just like with my old weather app, we knew with certainty what to do since there were no contending views. In early 1900’s England, if you were seeking some information you might pay 50 cents for the latest paper copy of Whitaker’s Almanack, in the US and Canada you might refer to the Farmer’s Almanac. Information you found there would be largely undisputed as there were no other competing information sources, no “imperfect copies”. Unlike my struggles with multiple weather apps, in 1860’s England the daily weather forecast came from The Times newspaper, one paper and one forecast, no confusion, no doubts. In the mid 1900’s, before computers and smart phones, if you wanted to know the time with some level of precision you simply picked up your phone and dialed the number for the US Naval Observatory to get the official time. Nowadays there are plenty of readily available options, including of course your always-present smart phone.

Today, every decision is presented with multiple possibilities making it very hard to pick an answer. As Aristotle once said – the more I know the more I know how much I don’t know.

We are not going to be able to stop the information explosion, even if we wanted to. Our growing information age library is becoming more and more complete, and in my view this is a wonderful thing. We should not task a few corporations or governments for that matter to eliminate “useless works” in order to simplify our choices, though many try and have tried throughout history using their own definition of “useless”. We should have the ability to find the best answer based on all available information, not information that is pre-filtered based on someone else’s criteria. Even if it requires hard work to sort through and pick the best answer. The more information we have available the better the answer we can find. Luckily in our case we will not be totally dependent on imperfect human librarians, we have our rapidly evolving technology to help us sift through the endless permutations and identify the right “volume” that suits our individual needs. We’ve already started on this path, today there are many services that use Artificial Intelligence powered algorithms to give us customized answers based on our behavior. For example, Netflix has in the order of 4,000 movies ready for streaming, yet when we sit down to watch a movie we seldom search all the movies from A – Z but instead depend on Netflix’s recommendations based on our own viewing habits – not someone else’s idea of good. Similarly if we want to find information online we might query a search engine that quickly searches all available information and delivers customized search results based on our individual usage. Our tools and abilities will only get better with time, and technology will provide us with customized answers based not just on our past behavior, but also perceived needs and future expectations taking us well beyond the skills of imperfect Librarians and reducing our frustration.

Still with the growing onslaught of data we cannot ignore the important issue of information privacy that needs to be addressed at the national and international levels, current efforts around the world include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation of 2018 and California’s recent 2020 passage of Proposition 24. Information privacy has always been an important consideration, from the use of wax sealed letters in the 16th century to the development of “secret alphabets” for telegraph messages in the mid 1800’s to today’s data encryption algorithms. Just as we have in the past, I expect that we will be able once again to strike the right balance between privacy and data freedom as we continue to build our information age library.

Unlike the men in the Library of Babel, we don’t need to become despondent at the increasing difficulty in finding the right answer among all available information. We will depend on our technology to help us navigate the information onslaught recognizing that as the amount of information increases so does the likelihood that it contains the better answer.