It is less clear, however, whether specialist systems retain this advantage on problems that are irreducibly multi-domain — where causation and remedy cannot be located within any single field of knowledge, but arise from the interaction of economic, political, historical, social, and ecological factors simultaneously. On such problems, the depth of specialist training may be insufficient, and the integration of outputs from multiple specialist systems an inadequate substitute for reasoning that holds all relevant domains at once.
The project known as the Technology of Good is concerned precisely with problems of this kind. The intellectual traditions it draws upon — including commons theory, heterodox economics, indigenous knowledge systems, and moral economy — are themselves integrative in character, having developed across and between established disciplinary boundaries. Their application to real institutional problems requires reasoning that is similarly cross-domain.
A general reasoning system trained across the breadth of recorded human knowledge may be better suited to this task than either a single specialist system or an ensemble of them. Whether this proves to be the case is one of the questions the Technology of Good is designed, in part, to investigate. In this respect the project constitutes an experiment in the application of general AI to complex, multi-domain social and institutional problems — conducted in the service of the broader inquiry into how human communities can organise themselves more equitably and sustainably.
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