Article by John Palfrey: “Sometime in the 18th century, the Enlightenment settled a contentious, centuries-old question: Where does knowledge come from? For millennia, many people had pointed to God. But the early modern period brought a new consensus, namely that knowledge comes from human scientists working at the edge of what is known, armed with observation, mathematics, experimentation, and logic.
As the historian Steven Shapin has noted, this was a social as much as an intellectual revolution. Science started rewiring our shared value system around the idea that research and rigor are virtuous. We held ourselves and our highest institutions to the standard of scientific inquiry.
No political system reflects this shift better than democracy. The ideal of popular sovereignty rests on the principle that each of us is capable of comparing candidates or policy proposals and reaching our own informed conclusion.
Today, we are on the cusp of a similar revolution. In September, one of OpenAI’s models took less than a week to solve a math problem that had stumped scientists for decades; and AI systems are already identifying novel antibiotic candidates by searching chemical spaces too vast for any research team to explore. In a growing number of fields, machines are autonomously producing new information. Humans are still posing the questions and evaluating the outputs, but the generative act—the creative leap across the unknown—is increasingly sparked by systems that do not think the way we do or really think at all.
As we saw with the Scientific Revolution, new information systems often lead to new epistemological and ethical systems. AI implicitly teaches us to value ease, speed, and outsourcing, and these values do have their place in certain contexts. No human can parse as much data as quickly as an AI can, and in sectors like medicine, speed often saves lives.
But as anyone who has watched the internet evolve in recent years knows, moving fast can mean breaking things. We cannot allow our democratic institutions to become one of those things…(More)”.
