312 - Your Clutter, Your Data

"Digital Clutter", which at corporate scales is also known as "Dark Data", is a largely silent detriment to human cognition and productivity. All of us have some "leaky habits" that cause this clutter to accumulate, requiring things like Spring Cleaning for your Downloads folder or emails.

While the process of reasoning through what to keep and what to archive or delete is fairly simple relative to many other real-world tasks, it is also incredibly tedious, and so people avoid it, sometimes to the point of their only real cleaning being when a computer is wiped or an account is closed. For example, how many thousands of old emails do you keep in your various email accounts? How many of those emails could you realistically ever need, let alone need available and searchable on-demand 24/7?

Now, think of the one-click button that many software packages offer to "clean" your system of the temporary files that accumulate and slow down the performance. People are happy to use that button, but those systems only clean the most obvious low-hanging fruit, they don't deal with digital clutter or dark data, yet.

I will note, LLMs and RL are fundamentally incapable of serving this function, no matter the training data, scale, or things that get duct-taped to them. This task requires genuine understanding and reasoning, things that even "reasoning models" don't deliver the faintest shred of. However, even a system with relatively weak understanding and reasoning, so long as it is both present and "antifragile" in dynamics, can handle the task of dealing with >80% of digital clutter and dark data.

That technology isn't hypothetical or theoretical and has been demonstrated since 2019, but people invested in glorified autocomplete functions that ate the internet instead. The same technology could also be used to both intelligently clean datasets used for other AI systems, and to selectively and iteratively improve those datasets post-cleaning.

If your systems displayed only the files and emails that you actually need, when you need them, and archived or cleaned up the rest, how much more productive might you be? Those systems are extensions of your own cognition, so de-cluttering them also de-clutters your mind.