A Full Epistemic Stack: Knowledge Commons for the 21st Century
We're writing this in our personal capacity. While our work at the Future of Life Foundation has recently focused on this topic and informs our thinking here, this specific presentation of our views are our own. Knowledge is integral to living life well, at all scales: * Individuals manage their life choices: health, career, investment, and others on the basis of what they understand about themselves and their environments. * Institutions and governments (ideally) regulate economies, provide security, and uphold the conditions for flourishing under their jurisdictions, only if they can make requisite sense of the systems involved. * Technologists and scientists push the boundaries of the known, generating insights and techniques judged valuable by combining a vision for what is possible with a conception of what is desirable (or as proxy, demanded). * More broadly, societies negotiate their paths forward through discourse which rests on some reliable, broadly shared access to a body of knowledge and situational awareness about the biggest stakes, people’s varied interests in them, and our shared prospects. * (We’re especially interested in how societies and humanity as a whole can navigate the many challenges of the 21st century, most immediately AI, automation, and biotechnology.) Meanwhile, dysfunction in knowledge-generating and -distributing functions of society means that knowledge, and especially common knowledge, often looks fragile [1]. Some blame social media (platform), some cynical political elites (supply), and others the deplorable common people (demand). But reliable knowledge underpins news, history, and science alike. What resources and infrastructure would a society really nailing this have available? Among other things, we think its communication and knowledge infrastructure would make it easy for people to learn, check, compare, debate, and build in ways which compound and reward good faith. This means tech, and we think the technical