Books I'm reading: Simon Winchester's "Knowing What We Know"

In his Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (Harper Perennial, 2024), Simon Winchester guides us with his usual skill (blending biography, intellectual history, and anecdote in lucid prose) through a broad and complex topic – human knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge – with a focus on a central question: How have we come to know what we know?

He sets out to explore the means by which knowledge (in the broadest sense) has been passed from generation to generation, covering everything from the earliest oral traditions and the emergence of writing to Wikipedia and AI language models. The digressions are many and always interesting, but sometimes the subject seems too big for a single volume. 

What emerges is a recurring concern with the vulnerability of knowledge – throughout history (for example, the risk of fire destroying an ancient library), but particularly in an age of information overload based on digital storage, and he ends the book with musings about the ease with which information about virtually anything is available today with the push of a button or a spoken request directed at a handheld device. He sounds a bit nostalgic about hard-won knowledge, relating a story about navigating on the open sea before GPS systems became available and I have long wondered how London cabbies must feel about GPS navigation considering the time and effort they have traditionally had to put into acquiring "the knowledge" (referring to map-perfect memorization of the streets of London). He never really answers the question of whether this availability of knowledge represents a loss or if we should see it as freeing our minds for other things, and so the end of the book left me hanging a little, but engaging storytelling throughout the book made it very much worth the time it took to read. From Winchester, I would have expected nothing less.