Theme 3: Knowledge and Technology
The Central Question
How does technology shape what we can know — and who can know it?
Technology is not merely a set of tools. It is a way of relating to the world that shapes what questions we can ask, what we can gather, and what counts as good . The invention of the microscope did not just allow biologists to see smaller things — it created a new field of knowledge (microbiology) that had not previously been possible.
AI and Knowledge Production
A central case for this unit is artificial intelligence — particularly its role in the Arts.
Consider the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), generated by a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) trained on 15,000 portrait paintings. It sold at Christie’s for $432,500. Questions this raises:
- Who is the artist? The algorithm? The team that designed it? The artists whose works trained it?
- Is AI capable of creating art? Or does it merely rearrange existing patterns without genuine understanding?
- Who owns the knowledge? If AI produces a “discovery” or a “work,” who holds the epistemic and legal rights?
Critic Cory Doctorow argues AI art is “uncanny” — it produces effects without agency. The “invisible hand” of the algorithm is not creating knowledge; it is rearranging it. But is this distinction between “creating” and “rearranging” as clear as it first seems? Does human creativity always involve something more?
Technology and
Technology is not politically neutral. Who controls the tools of knowledge production shapes who can participate in producing knowledge. Consider:
- Peer-reviewed journals gatekeep scientific knowledge — but also maintain quality standards
- Social media democratizes information — but also accelerates misinformation
- AI systems are trained on existing human-produced data — and inherit the biases embedded in that data
The for these effects is distributed across designers, institutions, users, and regulators.
Technology and Personalized Knowledge
If algorithms can generate personalized music for each listener based on their emotional state and history — what do we lose? Music has functioned as a shared cultural experience; personalization atomizes this. This is not just an aesthetic question — it is a knowledge question: what kind of knowledge about the human condition does shared artistic experience produce, and can personalized experience provide a substitute?