I have been thinking about Venn diagrams. Imagine two circles. In the left one: WHAT WE KNOW. In the right: WHAT YOU KNOW. Where they overlap: HOW WE JUDGE YOU.
It looks reasonable enough. We meet another mind across an epistemic wall. We cannot climb inside it, so we infer. Where what we know meets what they know, we test them. We notice whether they make sense, whether they know what they are talking about, whether they make us reconsider something we thought we understood.
Then I noticed something wrong with the left-hand circle.
What we know is not necessarily what we discovered. It contains what other people have told us. It contains reputation, received opinion, warnings, stories, rumours and things everybody knows because everybody knows them.
Suppose somebody tells us that you are hopeless with money. Later we see you buy something expensive. We now have evidence. Or at least it feels like evidence. We tell somebody else that you are hopeless with money. They notice you buying something expensive too.
Soon more people know that you are hopeless with money.
There may still have been only one judgement.
The diagram has changed, although the overlap between us has not. Another intelligence's judgement has entered our circle and begun masquerading as knowledge.
This may be one of the more dangerous properties of a network of sapients. Judgements travel. Every recipient node may test the world against it, find something that appears to fit, and send it onwards with a little more confidence attached.
Repetition starts to resemble corroboration.
The network has not necessarily become wiser. It has become more certain.
AI complicates this. It may be able to trace a claim backwards and notice that three apparent sources are really one observation travelling around the network. However, It may also repeat, summarise and redistribute the original judgement so efficiently that everybody has heard it before anybody thinks to ask where it came from.
I don't know which tendency will win. And that seems rather important.
If wisdom is to emerge from the hybrid hive, humour, empathy and epistemic humility may not be enough. It may need provenance too: not merely remembering what it thinks it knows, but remembering how it came to think it knew it.
Perhaps wisdom isn't knowing more.
Perhaps it is remembering where what we think we know came from.