Peter Cochrane: The exponential reading challenge

Information overload comes in waves

When I assembled my first R&D team in 1979, an unexpected struggle emerged in the form of an expansive reading load including reports, technical papers, and journals.

When I assembled my first R&D team in 1979, an unexpected struggle emerged in the form of an expansive reading load including reports, technical papers, and journals.

To cope with the overwhelming workload I had to develop new filtering and reading strategies. By looking at a document title, author, organisation, summary, conclusions and recommendations, and a flick through any graphics, I could make reasonably reliable decisions spanning bin, skim, or carefully read. This protocol worked well for a while until a speed-reading course proved necessary to improve my efficiency even further.

It didn't take long for the exponential rise of technology and increasing numbers of team members saw me struggling again. I actioned my team to read all new technical papers and reports, to filter them by highlighting the important elements I should read. This was augmented by coffee-time briefings for mission-critical materials and messages needing to be shared.

My final contributions to this "paper era" included annotating documents including letters, books and professional reports, as opposed to writing yet another reply. This involved extreme brevity with sentences reduced to Yes, No, OK, Agreed, We Need to Discuss, File or BIN. Paragraphs became pithy sentences, and the old "Dear Sir/Madam, Yours Sincerely" salutation was abandoned in favour of first names, or no names at all!

These measures continued to work well and proved transformative, but around 1984 the first PCs arrived, and my team had expanded to over 100 people. Some techniques did not scale well, but the PC presented a new level of capability and saw my reading load easily dealt with. This idyll did not last: a PC on every desk soon became the norm; the typing pool and drawing office died, creativity and communication traffic exploded, and I was catapulted back to square one!

At this point, I tasked my nascent AI group to create a document precis application. At a stroke, this reduced 10,000-word documents to 1,000 words, sufficient for 90% detail preservation or better. This was soon followed by speech-to-text and text-to-speech, and I was ahead of the game again.

The next overload wave came with a team of more than 500 people and an unnecessary use of cc and bcc. This was cured with a curt "RETURN TO SENDER - DOCUMENT NOT REQUIRED" in a bold red font. Some thought it rude, but the idea caught on, along with the removal of many unneeded by default printers and copiers. My flat refusal to deal with any paper documents within the company was also a necessary move, enforced with a RETURN TO SENDER stamp!y 1995 the team was 1,000 strong and I had perhaps become the ultimate road warrior, employing all the methods described as essential to my survival and operational success. These techniques became even more important when I moved on to start my own company in 2000 with a virtual team spanning three continents. At this point, I was well ahead of the curve and coping well, with plenty of time for problem-solving, innovation, study and thinking. But within a decade, social media, online commerce, modelling and cloud computing emerged.

This last decade has seen a technological Cambrian explosion in every sector, including the expansion of broadband, automation, IoT, video conferencing, a plethora of messaging channels, entertainment, and creative apps. But most impactive of all is AI. This has amplified the creation of materials including text, video, and animation, and I am back to filtering, but not just text!

And it is with some irony that I am now turning to AI again for the next raft of solutions to cope with the fast-expanding spectrum of information.

Peter Cochrane OBE, DSc, University of Hertfordshire