This is a linkpost for https://www.forethought.org/research/design-sketches-collective-epistemics
We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for AI tools that help with collective epistemics.
We think that these tools could be a pretty big deal:
- If it gets easier to track what’s trustworthy and what isn’t, we might end up in an equilibrium which rewards honesty
- This could make the world saner in a bunch of ways, and in particular could give us a better shot at handling the transition to more advanced AI systems
We’re excited for people to get started on building tech that gets us closer to that world. We’re hoping that our design sketches will make this area more concrete, and inspire people to get started.
The (overly-)specific technologies we sketch out are:
- Community notes for everything — Anywhere on the internet, content that may be misleading comes served with context that a large proportion of readers find helpful
- Rhetoric highlighting — Sentences which are persuasive-but-misleading, or which misrepresent cited work, are automatically flagged to readers or writers
- Reliability tracking — Users can effortlessly discover the track record of statements on a given topic from a given actor; those with bad records come with health warnings
- Epistemic virtue evals — Anyone who wants a state-of-the-art AI system they can trust uses one that’s been rigorously tested to avoid bias, sycophancy, and manipulation; by enabling “pedantic mode” its individual statements avoid being even ambiguously misleading or false
- Provenance tracing — Anyone seeing data / claims can instantly bring up details of where they came from, how robust they are, etc.
If you have ideas for how to implement these technologies, issues we may not have spotted, or visions for other tools in this space, we’d love to hear them.
This article was created by Forethought. Read the original on our website.
Browser extensions are almost[1] never widely adopted.
Whenever anyone reminds me of this by proposing the annotations everywhere concept again, I remember that the root of the problem is distribution. You can propose it, you can even build it, but it wont be delivered to people. It should be. There are ways of designing computers/a better web where rollout would just happen.
That's what I want to build.
Software mostly isn't extensible, or where it is, it's not extensible enough (even web browsers aren't as extensible as they need to be! Chrome have started sabotaging adblock btw!!). The extensions aren't managed collectively (Chrome would block any such proposal under the pretence that it's a security risk), so features that are only useful if everyone has them just can't come into existence. We continue to design under the assumption that ordinary people are supposed to know what they want before they've tried it.
There are underlying reasons for this: There isn't a flexible shared data model that app components can all communicate through, so there's a limit to what can be built, and how extensible any app can be. Currently, no platform supports sandboxed embedded/integrated components well.
So I started work there.
And then that led to the realization that there is no high level programming language that would be directly compatible with the ideal data model/type system for a composable web (mainly because none of them handle field name collision), so that's where we're at now, programming language design[2]. We also kinda need to do a programming language due to various shortcomings in wasm iirc.
But the adoption pathway is, make better apps for all of the core/serious/actually good things people do with the internet (blogging, social feeds, chat, reddit, wiki, notetaking stuff) (I already wanted to do this), make it crawlable for search engines, get people to transition to this other web that's much more extensible in the same way they'd transition to any new social network.
And then features like this can just grow.
Well, I just checked, apparently like 30% of internet users use ad blockers, that's shockingly hearteningly high, even mobile adoption is only half that. On the other hand, that's just ad blockers, and 30% isn't that good for something with universal appeal that's essentially been advertised for 30 years straight.
It initially seemed like LLM coding might make it harder to launch new programming languages, but nothing worked out the way people were expecting and I think they actually make it way easier. They can write your vscode integration, they can port libraries from other languages, they help people to learn the new language/completely bypass the need to learn the language by letting users code in english then translating it for them.