A quick note on epistemic security: we’ve just published a report exploring some of these ideas (previously discussed with GovAI) in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and the UK’s Defence Science Technology Laboratory, and building on a previous series of workshops (which Eric Drexler among others participated in). For those interested, it’s available below.
“Access to reliable information is crucial to the ability of a democratic society to coordinate effective collective action when responding to a crisis, like a global pandemic, or complex challenge like climate change. Through a series of workshops we developed and analysed a set of hypothetical yet plausible crisis scenarios to explore how technologically exacerbated external threats and internal vulnerabilities to a society’s epistemic security – its ability to reliably avert threats to the processes by which reliable information is produced, distributed, and assessed within the society – can be mitigated in order to facilitate timely decision-making and collective action in democratic societies.
Overall we observed that preserving a democratic society’s epistemic security is a complex effort that sits at the interface of many knowledge domains, theoretical perspectives, value systems, and institutional responsibilities, and we developed a series of recommendations to highlight areas where additional research and resources will likely have a significant impact on improving epistemic security in democratic societies”
A quick note on epistemic security: we’ve just published a report exploring some of these ideas (previously discussed with GovAI) in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and the UK’s Defence Science Technology Laboratory, and building on a previous series of workshops (which Eric Drexler among others participated in). For those interested, it’s available below.
https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/publications/tackling-threats-informed-decision-making-democratic-societies
“Access to reliable information is crucial to the ability of a democratic society to coordinate effective collective action when responding to a crisis, like a global pandemic, or complex challenge like climate change. Through a series of workshops we developed and analysed a set of hypothetical yet plausible crisis scenarios to explore how technologically exacerbated external threats and internal vulnerabilities to a society’s epistemic security – its ability to reliably avert threats to the processes by which reliable information is produced, distributed, and assessed within the society – can be mitigated in order to facilitate timely decision-making and collective action in democratic societies.
Overall we observed that preserving a democratic society’s epistemic security is a complex effort that sits at the interface of many knowledge domains, theoretical perspectives, value systems, and institutional responsibilities, and we developed a series of recommendations to highlight areas where additional research and resources will likely have a significant impact on improving epistemic security in democratic societies”