✦ Marginalia

"It’s great that we can generate all kinds of things now with AI, but it means that the rest of the aspects of science have to catch up: verification, validation, and assessing what ideas actually move the subject forward and which ones are dead ends or red herrings. That’s not something we know how to do at scale. For each individual paper, we can have a debate among scientists and get to a consensus in a few years. But when we’re generating a thousand of these every day, this doesn’t work."

"What comes next requires the protocol design community, which has made genuine progress in articulating rights and building architectures that protect individual autonomy, to recognize that the governance of shared resources cannot be derived from the intellectual traditions it currently works within, and to draw instead on fundamentally different ones: not just the technical architecture that brings shared resources into being, but the institutional arrangements that manage them, the collective-action mechanisms that sustain them, and the design principles, drawn from commons governance, organizational cybernetics, and cooperative design, that can help ensure they serve the communities that depend on them rather than the actors best positioned to capture them. This is the work that no protocol specification has yet attempted to describe."

"“If the work can be broken down into little replicable units that people can slot into, then you don’t need to see workers as people with expertise, with careers, with relationships. They are just providers of content or annotations or labeling or, in big scare quotes, ​‘intelligence.’”"

How do we make sure modular research doesn't result in gigification/over-automation of research?

"The infrastructure for collaboration still exists. What’s missing is the culture and incentives to use it."

"If you want to make sense of a complex world, you've got to have an internal system that is equally complex."

Interesting implications for collective intelligence systems

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