I want human knowledge to be more structured, and easier to consume and remember.
At the moment a lot is contained in non-fiction books. They tend to be approximately the same length (presumably demand/pressure from consumers/publishers/reviewers/society causes this) and have the following heirachy of structure (from biggest to smallest):
- book
- chapter
- page
- paragraph
- sentence
If I want a summary, I can get a whole book summary by reading the back cover, although this is often just a teaser and doesn't contain the conclusion so I probably have to read the whole thing and make my own summary. If I want to remember the key insights, I have to do this myself too. If I want to skip sections I already understand, I have no real method of doing so. If I want to understand how a book positions itself relative to other books and need to do this myself too.
I think we can do better, using technology. The best of technology combined with the best of humans should result in something pretty decent.
I like the concept of the abtract from academic papers - a mini version of the paper, complete with conclusion, it's not a teaser. You can then dig into the paper as you wish. And the structure of the paper means you can read it non-linearly, jumping about at will.
I want to be able to consume knowledge non-linearly. To start with an overall summary. When something looks interesting I can go one level deeper. I want to be able to get the essence of it as quickly as possible.
I want it to be dynamic, when the authors opinion changes, I want that reflected, when knowledge of facts change I want the content to change. When a topic is controversial, I want to see the debate.
I want it cross referenced, how does it relate to philosophical ideas, to political movements, to different academic fields. How does it fit in historical with our development of knowledge.
I imagine the author of a book already has a lot of structured information/knowledge during the process of writing the book. They then serialize it into the book narrative, and I the reader has to deserialize it back into structured knowledge. This is crazy if we have better tools for this, to enable a more direct transfer of structured knowledge.