Getting to the Truth
BY ROLAND HARWOOD
Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno
In an age of generative artificial intelligence, the ability to produce oceans of misinformation is increasingly easy. Yet getting accurate information has never been more crucial.
2024 will be the biggest election year in history, where 2.5 billion people on the planet will vote, which represents the majority of global GDP. So the information that underpins these decisions has global importance, especially in relation to the transition to a more sustainable future.
Within that context, here are two questions that are consuming me right now:
What is required to create trust across diverse communities when truth has a fluid meaning?
How do we make good investment decisions & accelerate the shift towards a net-zero future?
Both of these questions underpinned a fascinating roundtable discussion that I was part of this week hosted by Professor Julia Black at the London School of Economics together with Jimmy Wales (founder of the 5th most popular website in the world Wikipedia and more recently Trust Cafe) and Simon Dietz (founder of the Transition Pathway Initiative).
Wikipedia is based upon the simple but powerful belief that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. Jimmy made a compelling case for that fact that we really don’t want to get into a situation where facts are copyrighted.
90% of Wikipedia’s funding comes from small donors means that viral growth in unimportant. But business models for trusted information really matter. The biggest companies in the world have learned that clickbait, outrage and misinformation really works. But these advertising-based business models for information means we remain distracted by train crashes and not on what really matters.
The subscription based business model works at a global level like wikipedia and the Guardian but less well for local journalism such as Jimmy’s home town of Huntsville Alabama, a city of 300,000 people that no longer has a local paper. Trust Cafe is another of his experiment at a new type of social media that has no ads, no paywall and only voluntary payments.
Unlike big tech Wikipedia have never agreed to censor content for any government. That’s been challenged many times of course. Wikipedia was blocked for 3 years in Turkey, only ending in what is now a landmark decision on the freedom of expression and that you can’t block a website arbitrarily. This is underpinned by another important rule in that Wikipedia does no original research. but relies upon reputable sources to cite. Wikipedia remains blocked in China and that appears unlikely to change any time soon.
However whilst inspired by open source, Wikipedia and Trust Cafe are not entirely peer to peer - they are aristocracies. People with high levels of trust gain kudos and points and it all flows from there. Of the 2 billion people who read wikipedia only about 70-90,000 people make 5 or more edits on the platform so represent a tiny minority = 1/200th of 1%
Simon Dietz, also presented some fascinating work about the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) which is based upon the fact that, when it comes to the transition to net zero, almost all of the money is flowing to the wrong places. It’s a capital allocation problem and at least some of that is down to a lack of good information. TPI seeks to address that. It is independent, academic and non-profit, and contains vast amounts of climate data broken down by sector and maturity.
Both TPI and Wikipedia are seeking to provide what economists call public goods and free riders are a really problem in both cases. Notwithstanding that much of the discussion was around journalism, the problem with getting to the truth is not with journalism, but with culture. There was some debate about regulation but when comparing the US with the UK (that has much stricter regulation) the quality of the journalism is not perceived to be wildly different.
In terms of transition pathways I am fascinated by how we unlock the biggest investment and innovation opportunity on the planet - namely the climate crisis - as a co-founder of climate tech supercluster and currently working with 51 towns and cities to transition towards net zero living. And yet most investment in innovation comes from venture capital in software, whereas climate is fundamentally about hardware and requires a lot more capital and non-equity based finance.
And in responsible use of technology is crucial in how we get there. In my current role as community lead at Milestone (part of Canon) I’m fascinated by how we build and embed trusted information through humanity-centered design and ensure an ethical use of data to build and sustain trust.
For me this roundtable helped me to shape my thinking around three main areas:
Getting to the truth requires a plurality of perspectives.
Business models can matter more than regulation.
Trusted communities are aristocracies not democracies.
The interaction between rapid developments in articifical intelligence and machine learning, together with existential global challenges such as the climate crisis will consume us all in the years to come. I don’t know about you but that seems to me like an urgent mission and purpose.
Trust is hard won, and easily lost in a so called post-truth world. This liminal decade is already beyond the point of no return, and the turbulence of only going to get amplified before we can get through to the other side. And getting to the truth matters more than ever, in this increasingly connected world.
The truth will set you free they say, and I’ve always preferred learning as a verb and not a noun. So right now I’m focussed upon learning by doing, sharing as much as possible, and trying to connect people, places and ideas in this increasingly connected world.
What about you?
