sole keeper
Humans Can't Be the Sole Keepers of Scientific Knowledge
There's an old joke that physicists like to tell: Everything has already been discovered and reported in a Russian journal in the 1960s, we just don't know about it. The volume of knowledge is vast and growing quickly: The number of scientific articles posted on arXiv (the largest and most popular preprint server) in 2021 is expected to reach 190,000--and that's just a subset of the scientific literature produced this year. It's clear that we do not really know what we know, because nobody can read the entire literature even in their own narrow field (which includes, in addition to journal articles, PhD theses, lab notes, slides, white papers, technical notes, and reports). Indeed, it's entirely possible that in this mountain of papers, answers to many questions lie hidden, important discoveries have been overlooked or forgotten, and connections remain concealed. Artificial intelligence is one potential solution.