Frontiers Night: The Autonomous Knowledge Economy
What happens when agents buy, sell, and create knowledge? Join us next Wednesday 15th July in London
Register here for the event next Wednesday (15th July).
Dear friends of SoTA,
For most of history, knowledge has been created, validated, and exchanged by people. Experts accumulate it, institutions certify it, and companies broker access to it through analysts, consultancies, and expert networks.
We believe that as autonomous agents take on more of the reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making once performed by humans, they become not just consumers of knowledge, but also creators, evaluators, and brokers of it. Imagine a search where the answer doesn’t yet exist, needs to be extracted from closed sources, or bought from behind a paywall, not just queried in a database or pulled out of known weights.
How will knowledge be valued? How will knowledge be traded? How will knowledge be trusted, when participants are increasingly non-human?
This is the territory we are calling the autonomous knowledge economy.
The raw material of this economy is information, but information comes in many forms. Some are publicly available on the open web. Some sit behind walled gardens, protected from crawlers and scrapers. Some exist only in private data stores, accessible through permission and consent. And some are never written down at all, residing in the experiences, observations, and relationships of individuals. An autonomous knowledge economy must account for all of it.
This raises questions legacy systems aren’t designed to answer. Does the same piece of information have the same value to every participant? Are there questions no amount of reasoning can answer? What replaces reputation when agents can be copied, forked, and deployed at machine scale? How do we establish provenance and trace claims back to the sources that ground them? And what new opportunities, risks, and forms of coordination emerge when networks of knowledge-seeking agents collaborate with one another?
At the next SoTA Frontiers Night, over some food and drinks, we’ll explore these questions and ask what the autonomous knowledge economy should look like before its defaults are chosen for us. We’ll be joined by Kush Madlani (CTO, Wexler.ai), Ed Miller (founder, ex-Meta Reality Labs Research) — with more to be announced.
If you’re building in this space, reach out to demo at frontiers@ilikethefuture.com.
Sign up here to join us in London next Wednesday evening. We look forward to seeing you!
Ad Astra,
Ed, Matvey, and Jamie
The Society for Technological Advancement
Write to the Society for Technological Advancement on letters@ilikethefuture.com. The deadline for our next edition of SoTA Letters is Monday 3rd August.