Knowledge is like a sphere: the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown. - Blaise Pascal
Consider the following idea: “It was possible as recently as three hundred years ago for one highly learned individual to know everything worth knowing. By the 1940s, it was possible for an individual to know an entire field, such as psychology. Today, the knowledge explosion makes it impossible for one person to master even a significant fraction of one small area of one discipline.” [1]
Now, if one understands ignorance to be both (a) an individual (rather than collective) phenomenon, and (b) measured according to the difference between what humanity as a collective whole knows versus what the individual knows, then it seems hard to deny that ignorance is rapidly growing. The reason is, basically, because as collective knowledge grows exponentially (or something close to that), the cognitive resources of the individual remain fixed and finite.
But some thinkers have argued that the same thing is happening with collective ignorance. On his blog The Technium, Kevin Kelly defines “ignorance” as the numerical difference between the questions that we, the collective whole, have posed versus the answers that we have provided to those questions. The idea here is that with each new answer comes two or more new questions. Kelly says:
Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing [exponentially]. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
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