Reality is a point of view, it’s just that humans struggle to accept this too relative idea and ask for certainties. The most fragile demand a simple truth, others reassure themselves in the struggle and dialectical comparison between one and zero, few accept the sweetness of shipwreck and the freedom of the infinite. Intellectuals, especially professional ones, are struggling to put order in the world, chasing the Babelian architecture of universal knowledge. When Diderot and D’Alambert revealed their project on that day in 1751 they were not simply thinking of a gigantic dictionary. The undertaking is much more ambitious. It is defining the boundaries of knowledge that redeems man from ignorance, superstition and the domination of authority. It is the revolt of enlightenment against those who in the name of God proclaim themselves the measure of all things. He is against absolute power. All very nice, but that idea had to deal with reality. Not only did the light at a certain point get lost in the terror and the words became guillotines, but there was a flaw in the starting point. Who decides the boundaries of knowledge? Who writes the entries in the Encyclopédie? The problem is ancient and has never been solved. Every era has had its absolute encyclopedia. The Greeks had logos, the Church had dogma, the Enlightenment had reason, the twentieth century had science.
Knowledge is never neutral. The trouble is that whoever designs it sells it as the only truth. Every time they are the scribes, the priests, the soothsayers, the scholars, the wise men and then the philosophers, state officials, theologians, scientists. The ultimate encyclopedic answer, as we know, is the knowledge shared by all. It is not perfect knowledge, but knowledge in progress. An encyclopedia in which anyone can correct anyone, where the truth is the result of a compromise between versions, theses, notes, sources. It is a conflict machine that works precisely because it is not infallible. There would be no “Wikipedia truth”, but a truth that is rewritten every day.
It is the democracy of Wikipedia, a pity that it hides the same deception as Rousseau’s direct democracy, because what counts is the general will, a very vague metaphysical principle that embodies the demiurgic will of the Legislator, that is, the one above good and evil. Wikipedia hides the same trick. Democracy for all and power for the few. If Mr. Nobody tries to write or modify an entry, one of the administrators immediately intervenes to file, delete, restore. He clearly does so in the name of truth. How can you blame him? The problem is whether administrators think like a “party”, a “school”, an “ideology”, a “worldview”. Anything outside that order becomes worse than heresy. It is something unworthy, on a scale that goes from blasphemy to common sense. It is the truth of the clerics. It is sanctified science where there are no longer competing theories, where there is no possibility of criticism, even going so far as to deny the principle of falsifiability. Wikipedia’s dream went sour when it began to search for a moral reality. It is there that being transmigrated into having to be, as if it were the soul so dear to Plato.
If you want to understand Elon Musk’s Grokipedia project you have to start here. There is always someone who wants to rewrite the world, or at least catalog it. Mr. Tesla ultimately chose to no longer simply be an adventurer, a free philosopher, an anarcho-capitalist, a black sheep or a maverick. He is no longer a Jedi from Star Wars and has allowed himself to be poisoned by anger and resentment. So to challenge the cultural power of the citadel, which is power over the unspeakable, it brands, makes you Dalit, untouchable, outcaste, he writes his encyclopedia. It’s just the beginning but it already contains 885 thousand definitions. How does Musk plan to resolve the issue of clerics, the masters of thought? Taking power away from humans. The idea is that an artificial intelligence can select, filter, choose the sources and return a clear, objective summary. An encyclopedia that doesn’t argue, doesn’t argue, doesn’t sweat. The risk, however, is to build a machine that mistakes coherence for truth. Popper had warned us: the truth is never a point of arrival, but a moving horizon. It is a provisional hypothesis, ready to fall as soon as contrary evidence arrives. It is fragile, because it lives on doubt. It is risky, because it cannot be decided by decree, neither human nor digital. The dilemma of the non-neutrality of knowledge remains there, on the table of good human or too human intentions. Is machine intelligence neutral? His thinking, and his morals, depend on who writes the algorithm and on the limits on “thinking badly” and this is already a nuance of objectivity. Then the machine is trained, as is done with children or dogs, with positive reinforcements for its actions and beliefs. Then in this story of omnipotent fathers and children balanced between chance and necessity there is the question of free will: will generative artificial intelligence, with its desire to learn from dialogue with humans and from mistakes, be able to have personal opinions? Luckily it won’t be the machine that gives us the truth.
Diderot and D’Alambert as the years went by were eventually a little disappointed in the wonderful project of their encyclopedia. There is no doubt that they left such a profound mark on Western culture that, without wanting to, they marked the way for the metaphorical death of God. Except that absolute reason, fortunately, has not yet taken its place. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger are following different destinies. Jimmy still dreams of free knowledge, but he tries to defend Wikipedia from predators every day. The more philosophical Sanger has distanced himself from his creation, which no longer has anything of the initial neutrality, and in search of a spiritual vision of life he converted to Christianity. And he wonders about unanswered things: “How is it possible that the universe is so well organised?”.
Elon Musk just has to remember a novel he has certainly read. It’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The answer to the “fundamental question about life, the universe and everything” is 42. However, it will take 7.5 million years to get it.