The Revolution of the Way of Thinking
Originally published as a Desk of Brad on October 23, 2020
“Have the courage to use your own understanding.”
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
The Keyword Illusion
All of us have grown up in a world where keywords are the basis for search and advertising. It is everywhere and embedded in everything we do. The device does not matter. The software platform does not matter. The paradigm is the same. You open a search bar, type in some keywords or phrases, and hope you find what you are looking for.
In the world of unlimited computing power and artificial intelligence, this should not be the best we can do. Computer science was never supposed to be built on hope, guessing, or tricking people to click on something that was not exactly what they were looking for. Consider the absurdity of the current paradigm. You ask a direct question and receive a series of answers, half of which are self-serving, the other half close to what you needed, but only if you asked the question perfectly. If that were a conversation with your doctor, you would never go back.
A New Way of Solving the Problem
We tolerate inaccurate, disingenuous search because it is the current paradigm. We are used to it. But familiarity is not the same as adequacy. To drive real change, not just an evolution of technology, you need a fundamentally new way of solving the problem. Immanuel Kant used the phrase “revolution of the way of thinking” (Revolution der Denkart) in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. He was describing the kind of shift that Greek mathematics brought to geometry and Newtonian physics brought to the natural sciences. Not an incremental improvement, but a complete reframing of what the discipline could be.
What the Industry Must Build
The current search paradigm is insufficient, and the industry knows it. The question is whether the next generation of tools will be another incremental improvement or something genuinely new. I believe the answer lies in a combination of disciplines that have been developing in parallel but have never been properly integrated: ontologies, the semantic web, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Together, these fields offer a way to move beyond keyword matching and toward systems that actually understand what a person is asking and why.
No single discipline will solve this problem. Ontologists cannot build it without engineers. Linguists cannot train it without data scientists. Designers cannot shape it without understanding the underlying knowledge architecture.
The revolution Kant described, the shift from accumulating answers to restructuring the question, requires interdisciplinary teams willing to work at the boundaries of their expertise. The future of search, and of information itself, belongs to the organizations that build these teams: groups where computer scientists sit alongside linguists, where taxonomists collaborate with machine learning engineers, where user researchers inform the ontology.
This is not a technology problem. It is a team-building problem. And the organizations that recognize this first will change the relationship between people and information forever.
Let’s go be great.