Knowing What We Know

Simon Winchester, a British-born author and journalist, opens with a personal memory from 1947: at nearly three years old, he stepped into a rubber boot outside his London home and was stung by a wasp. The pain taught him, in a single empirical flash, what a wasp was, what it could do, and how to tell his left foot from his right. He uses this small episode to frame a far larger inquiry. The book traces how human beings have transmitted knowledge across thousands of years, from the earliest oral traditions to modern electronics, and poses a central existential question: If machines eventually acquire all knowledge and do all thinking, "what, pray, is the need for us to be?" (7).

Winchester establishes a working definition of his subject. He traces the English word knowledge from its Old English origins in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of AD 963 to the Oxford English Dictionary's formulation: the apprehension of fact or truth with the mind. He then turns to Plato, who in his dialogue Theaetetus (369 BC) had Socrates propose that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB): a proposition that is true, believed to be true, and supported by logical justification. This definition has anchored epistemology for 2,400 years. Winchester explains that for centuries religious authorities supplied society's accepted truths, and that the Enlightenment, led by figures such as Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, detached belief from dogma and attached it to testable evidence. He also introduces the DIKW pyramid, a hierarchy of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom inadvertently inspired by T. S. Eliot's 1934 poem The Rock, which asks, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (19). Winchester signals that the potentially imperiled future of wisdom is the reason the book exists.

Before turning to formal education, Winchester examines how indigenous peoples have long transmitted knowledge through songs, rituals, and elders' teachings. When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck the Andaman Islands on December 26, 2004, killing some 7,000 people, the 500 indigenous inhabitants of the Onge, Jarawa, and Sentinelese groups all survived because traditional knowledge instructed them to run inland when they observed unusual changes in the sea. He also notes that the earliest known written transmission of knowledge is a cuneiform tablet, a piece of clay impressed with wedge-shaped writing, from around 3100 BC recording a receipt of barley by an accountant named Kushim, marking the shift from oral to written knowledge.

The first chapter, "Teach Your Children Well," opens with the story of Shukla Bose, a successful Bengali businesswoman who in 2003 set up a trestle table beside a fetid canal in one of Bangalore's worst slums and offered free education to any child who came. She signed up 11 children on her first day; by 2021, there were four schools and a junior college with 1,600 students. Winchester uses the Bangalore schools to argue that curiosity is the driving force behind knowledge acquisition, introducing psychologist Daniel Berlyne's classification of curiosity along two axes: specific versus diversive and perceptual versus epistemic. He traces the history of formal education from the Tablet House of Nippur in ancient Mesopotamia, one of the world's first purpose-built schools, through educational reform in China and Japan. He devotes particular attention to Fukuzawa Yukichi, the Japanese scholar who traveled to San Francisco in 1860 and argued that Japan must absorb Western knowledge to avoid colonial subjugation. The chapter concludes by contrasting examination systems: the British O Levels and A Levels, the American SAT (created in 1926 by Carl Brigham, a Princeton eugenicist who later repudiated his own racially biased methods), and China's Gaokao, a three-day ordeal taken by 10 million students each June, descended from an imperial examination system dating to AD 589.

The second chapter, "Gathering the Harvest," concerns the storage of knowledge. Winchester traces libraries from King Ashurbanipal's seventh-century BC collection in Nineveh through the Great Library of Alexandria, built under the Ptolemaic dynasty in the third century BC, cataloging prominent destructions: the Nazi razing of Warsaw's collections in 1944, the burning of the Mosul University Library by ISIS in 2016. He describes the evolution from Diderot's Encyclopédie to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which printed its final edition in 2010, and the Mundaneum, an ambitious Belgian project begun in 1895 by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine to catalog all human knowledge on index cards, which ultimately failed. He identifies computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of the mouse, hypertext links, and on-screen editing as a pivotal moment. This demonstration led, through Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web, to Wikipedia, founded in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, whose earlier peer-reviewed effort, Nupedia, had stalled. Sanger proposed a wiki format where anyone could edit any page, and Wikipedia eventually grew to contain 100 times as many entries as Britannica at its peak.

The third chapter, "This Just In," traces the physical media of knowledge transmission: the invention of paper in AD 105 by Chinese court official Cai Lun, Gutenberg's creation of movable metal type in the 1440s, and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible between 1452 and 1455, chosen for commercial rather than spiritual reasons. Winchester follows the rise of newspapers from the 1604 Strasbourg Relation, using the 1883 Krakatoa eruption to illustrate how the telegraph created a global village, and analyzes photographs that shifted public consciousness, including William Anders's 1968 Earthrise image and wartime images from Vietnam. He profiles the BBC under John Reith, whose mandate to inform, educate, and entertain established a model for public service broadcasting.

The fourth chapter, "Annals of Manipulation," examines how knowledge has been distorted. Winchester recounts the 1924 Zinoviev letter scandal, in which a forged document leaked to the Daily Mail helped defeat Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. He provides an extended account of the Chinese government's erasure of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and his own experience witnessing Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972, when British paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians, an event whitewashed by an official tribunal but corrected 38 years later by the Saville Inquiry. He profiles Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the father of public relations, who persuaded women to smoke by branding cigarettes as "torches of freedom" (270), and recounts the fabricated congressional testimony of a girl called Nayirah during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The fifth chapter, "Just Leave the Thinking to Us," argues that technologies have progressively relieved the human mind of the need to think. Winchester traces devices from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, the world's first true computer, through Jerry Merryman's 1967 creation of the first handheld calculator at Texas Instruments and the development of GPS from a constellation of satellites. He examines Google, founded at Stanford in 1996, explaining how its Page Rank algorithm ranks web pages by recursively analyzing their links, and raises the phenomenon of digital amnesia, the tendency for information looked up online to be forgotten almost immediately. The chapter concludes with artificial intelligence, from John McCarthy's 1956 Dartmouth workshop, which established the conjecture that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it" (312), through the text-generating AI model GPT-2 and the conversational AI system ChatGPT, which arrived in late 2022. Winchester invokes the scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the computer HAL tells astronaut Dave, "This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye" (316), articulating the fear that machines might one day regard humans as irrelevant.

The final chapter, "The First and Wisest of Them All," asks what becomes of wisdom if machines eliminate the need for knowledge and thought. Winchester profiles polymaths including the 11th-century Chinese scientist Shen Gua, who recognized the compass's navigational potential and wrote on topics from astronomy to geology, and public intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Richard Feynman. He traces the chain of decisions from physicist Leo Szilard's 1933 realization of the nuclear chain reaction through the Manhattan Project and the Hiroshima bombing, noting that scientists warned in the 1945 Franck Report that mankind was not "ethically and politically prepared to use it wisely" (364). He contrasts this failure with the deliberation of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and profiles Mau Piailug, a Micronesian navigator who in 1976 guided a traditional Hawaiian canoe 2,750 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments, as an exemplar of indigenous wisdom.

Winchester closes with a hopeful counterargument. He suggests that if machines handle the heavy cognitive work, the human mind might be freed rather than diminished. Humankind, unshackled from factual overload, could sit back and truly think, coming to know not only what we do know, but what we should know in order to be fully human.