Is the control of knowledge power? | DW Documentary
Is the control of knowledge power? | DW Documentary
For centuries humans have been trying to study our planet to bring order to chaos to explain our own existence. We encounter a flood of information every day but is it making us any more intelligent dealing with an increasingly digitalized world is overwhelming it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between true and false how do you find the truth I'm really passionate though about Building Technology that make people's lives better you see the future is absolutely crazy we're already living in a science fiction novel build a computer I'm Anita scha my chapter in this science fiction novel is about knowledge and who gets to control [Music] it [Music] over three centuries ago the Age of Enlightenment began bringing with it progress reason and human rights today these achievements are at risk do we need a new Enlightenment for the 21st [Music] century my resum might seem a bit unconventional I've never had a 9-to-5 job I've started six different University programs built a race car founded companies and worked in Silicon Valley I've also just created an AI model with my startup Iris AI it's a kind of superb brain that will capture all the world's scientific research organize it logically and make it openly accessible along with 20 other Tech nerds across 11 countries I mean with this machine we we will have the potential to really connect all that knowledge and build new knowledge in a way that human beings just won't be capable of but I think the challenge today for example if I want to know about the enlightenment I can search for terms like philosophy or D with one click Iris spits out hundreds of academic articles 300 years ago Enlightenment philosopher Deni D was already trying to organize our knowledge of the world instead of the internet he used books and he spoke to people like surgeons mechanics and watchmakers born in 17713 dito was the eldest son of a knife maker his father wanted him to become a priest instead Deno became the opposite an atheist who had no room for God in his worldview the French thinker went on to reshape how he saw our world with his magnum opus the onlo PD 17 volumes 71,000 articles 20 million words it was the largest publishing project of the 18th century instead of following church history or ruling dynasties it offered a new strictly alphabetical order entries for Saints shared the page with those of Craftsmen Kings stood on equal footing with farm animals working people took the place of spoiled Aristocrats it was a reversal of power relations in book form almost every bit of progress that we have made in the last 250 years we have made on the back of the Enlightenment the idea that we can use science and reason to improve human well-being has worked it's an actual fact science as a quest for knowledge seems to me to be utterly admirable and among the noblest things that the human species is capable of who controls knowledge who who decides what's true and what's false what we get taught and what gets ignored D's 18th century collection of knowledge challenged the existing power relations not that it was perfect as a woman I wouldn't have been allowed to contribute to the encyclopedi the authors were all French men they described the world from their perspective of course there were things that got overlooked you know so science in it in itself is Not Innocent somebody like J you know with the brilliant concept of the encyclopedia if that same project of the encyclopedia then becomes universalized seeing that this is the knowledge that has to be spread all over the world and it has to be you know the Alpha and the Omega then it becomes [Music] problematic my Journey Begins in Ghana the first subsaharan African country to gain independence freedom and Justice it states on the Black Star Gate built to commemorate Ghana's birth as a free state in 1957 has Independence allowed the country to break free from foreign ways of thinking what European encyclopedi deemed the only true knowledge indos encycloped Ghana was still called the Gold Coast a country comprising a variety of Kingdoms and where Gold Dust was once found that was all the book said for Dido the coast was all he could describe little is known about the interior he wrote three centuries later every last corner of the continent seems to have been surveyed and measured peoples mountains and rivers have been given names these days anyone who wants to have their say about what we consider to be knowledge can do so on the internet but hundreds of millions of Africans still don't have internet access while Global Tech Giants try to bring the continent online it's clear that whoever supplies the infrastructure also exports their own world view so between China and the West a race for digital dominance in Africa has begun at the startup incubator messed young Tech entrepreneurs from all over Africa are hard at work they're not just interested in turning business ideas into profit the goal is to use digital technology to create jobs and improve standards of living and to find Homegrown Solutions to African problems Angela okunade came to Ghana from Nigeria to join the mess team um this is a world famous wall everyone who comes here takes a photo so we can take selfie later yes okay so all these people belong to different companies they working on their um startups and where they're all from Congo from the Republic of Ben civo um Botswana just all around the continent from Uganda all over diverse training at M is in high demand with 1,500 applicants buying for just 60 places each applicant brings with them an idea for a tech startup M entrepreneurs seek to improve people's lives a weather app to help small Farmers prevent crop failures or a microcredit system that works without an expensive smartphone similar to my startup Iris it's often about making knowledge accessible Ada and favors app aims to improve sex education for women clean and so you both moved to Acra to start this company yes so we're a team of four actually a panafrican team of four we have a gard and an ivorian on the team so I'm Nigerian and she's malan how's that working out my startup also has co-founders from four different countries all over Europe so across European so it has some some cultural challenges now and then I don't know if you have you experience language could be a barer you have a a demo you can show us right yes we do yes Mas is a forum where women can discuss on various topics we have infections and diseases maternity so you could be anonymous share your question you know if it's posted a gynecologist can respond and other people that have gone through this issue can give me tips and also um help women you know understand their body and destigmatize these conditions or these areas that um Society has placed a stigma on what's your vision uh for the continent at large in like the next 50 years what's your take on that o so in the next two decades for instance the Africa is going to have the highest population of Youth in 50 years everyone is going to be coming to Africa cuz we're going to be innovating new ideas we going to be building new tech companies and it's just going to be a pretty happy and improved space the pan-africanism championed by mest is spreading further and further 54 of the 55 African states are now working together as part of a newly created free trade zone the largest in the world supporters see it as an attempt to reverse the power imbalance and prevent the continent from being exploited half a century before the French Revolution Dido was studying at the famous sborn university in Paris when his father cut him off financially he eak out living as a tutor earning extra money writing sermons pamphlets even pornography meanwhile he began to make a name for himself in debating circles French Enlightenment thinkers would Gather in salons or cafes like the procop to argue their theories and discuss the latest Global developments voler delom rouso and in the center of it all the rhetorically gifted Deni Doro the salons of the 18th and early 19th century were far more important for the spreading and developing intellectual ideas than the universities [Music] were dito is said to have worked on the encycloped at one of these tables the Cafe Legend goes that he sat near the stove so he could burn unwanted Pages before they fell into the hands of the sensors Dido wrote his first major work in secret secret the pon philosophic published anonymously in 1746 in strictly Catholic France his ideas was scandalous he described Christian dogma as absurd and atrocious one morning Dido was arrested right here at number three rud estrad the religious revival has something to do with the desire to hold on to what seem to be Eternal values and it becomes like a in thing to hold on to something that is unchanging I've never understood why the fact that you get comfort from something makes you believe it's true it as stevenh Pinker said if you if you're being pursued by a lion you may get comfort from your implicit faith that it's a rabbit but actually it's not a rabbit it's a lion it's going to eat you face up to [Music] reality burning with all your desire in West Africa highly conservative Christianity has been spreading in recent decades unlike in 18th Century Paris it's not Catholicism that dominates here but a host of independent Protestant churches their preachers take a strong view of those who think [Music] differently like the singer Aiza for example the self-proclaimed voodoo witch is often seen as a kind of devil incarnate for her part Aiza isn't fighting against religion itself but above all against [Music] rchy when the colonialist came to the African continent they basically said you know your deities your gods are false gods you know and there's one God which is the Christian God you know I mean that applies to Islam as well and every other religion that you know takes upon itself you know the right to go impose you know a God on other people for God God sick [Music] why but these so-called false gods haven't died out they live on in the form of thousands of years of spiritual knowledge waiting to be revived take all your candy money ain't to an African day Snak on my head a nigg stone like pills I wonder what dero would have thought about Aiza he believed in the Revolutionary power of science for Aiza the path to Liberation lies in the traditions of voodoo the belief in invisible forces and in a higher [Music] self you've called yourself a modern-day witch well I'm more like a modern day Priestess to put it in a nice way mhm what does that mean Ghana misunderstood the word Witch uh they take witch to be more like someone that'll you know eat your flesh and fly at night and kill you and you know the scary sh meanwhile on the other side of the world Witch Is A Healer someone a priestess someone who can who is advantaged enough to work with spirits that can show them you know what is to come the future do you find that there's a difference between how people in Ghana and people in the US react can respond to your music oh yeah absolutely in what ways uh I'm Ghana's black child I'm the black sheep in the industry that's yeah yeah yeah Ghana is a Christian Nation right so imagine this girl comes out calling herself the Voodoo music Queen they're like don't bring that Voodoo Girl here we don't want Voodoo stuff we don't want and I'm laughing but it's ridiculous because it's our tradition what we have here are so powerful if they knew they would be beating their chest like gorillas voo is embedded in our culture you know you can't run away from it you can't it's true that the enlightenment uh often attacked the established church and its hierarchies and its orthodoxies but it preserved a very deep sense of reverence whatever you think created the world it wasn't you ASA wants to show me the world's biggest Voodoo Festival so we take a road trip from Ghana through Togo to Benin for her Voodoo isn't a religion it's a way of life it's based on knowledge that's been passed down from generation to generation it's not written in any encyclopedia which also means it's in danger of dying out completely so we're here at the beach in waa where hundreds of thousands of people just vanished they didn't just vanish some were bought and sold they were stolen what kind of knowledge do you think was lost um during the colonization a lot um first morality um the moral morals are an important thing it's it's it's part of the culture it's embedded in you so the morals is the first thing and the tradition the knowledge that the people that were taken away lost and when you take people's day you know daily routines and practices away from them you've basically killed them I believe our future is in our past uh in the sense that in order to actually evolve and live and see our future you have to know what happened in the past in the diaspora a lot of these people who were taken away they're from spiritual homes and whether they like it or not it could be 50,000 years the bloodline Remains the Same and so if you are supposed to be a priestess when the time comes for the calling you can't run from [Music] it there is no such thing as shame in our culture with colonization there came a lot of self haate a lot of it so it's something that's new and it's spread like a virus and that's where the problem always [Music] starts in 1749 Dido wrote a word work called letter on the blind for the use of those who can see he wanted to show how much our senses influenced us including our morality he argued that for a person who can't see theft is the biggest crime of all whereas it can't matter to them if another person dresses decently or stands naked in a Marketplace Dido concluded that morality was not Universal was dependent on our sensory perceptions for dito knowledge comes from bodily experience it doesn't stem from reason but from the senses from feeling and touching things he went even further arguing that pleasure was the most important principle of life and he himself was no stranger to pleasure whether in his erotic novels the Affairs he had or in salons and cafes his theories were often helped Along by good food and wine I've been eating like a young wolf did AO once wrote I'm getting round as a ball it's early morning on the London Underground if the commuters here are having any kind of sensory experience then it's probably thanks to their smartphones in De Ro's time knowledge was controlled by King and clergy in our world data Reigns Supreme pretty much anything about our world could be found via search engines like Google and personalized algorithms determine which parts of the world we all get to see when internet became so popular now we have even more radical form of democracy everyone can participate through the internet um but instead of um broadening our perspective internet uh internet actually makes people even more closed at the bottom you have data an entire ocean of data then here a bit smaller you have information then comes knowledge and then at the very top a very small amount of wisdom so it's about climbing that pyramid from data to information to knowledge to wisdom sometimes the path to wisdom begins with a simple search query when I type in D the search engine gives me nearly 16 Million results in under a second and the first hit the open encyclopedia Wikipedia among the world's top 15 websites it's the only one that's not for profit and if I want to add to the accumulated knowledge about Dio I can just like thousands of others before me I can also join the discussion about where the truth lies Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales helped create the largest Democratic encyclopedia media in history a for the internet era but unlike the encycloped Wikipedia has to contend with fake news conspiracy theories and lobbying a world where everyone can broadcast their own version of what's true if you count the legal votes I easily win if you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us in the face of polarization and political influence can Wikipedia survive as a public repository of objective truth said that skepticism has to be the the first step of finding the truth that that has to be the Touchstone for for everything do you do you agree with that uh yeah I do you know if you're in school today you definitely need to be fully trained on how to spot misinformation uh how to check if a seemingly what looks like a new site is a real new site or not and if you don't have the ability to distinguish between the two then you are quite vulnerable and we do see quite a lot of people and this isn't just young [Music] people so in the current world we're in who has the power over knowledge oh I mean I don't think anyone has power over knowledge at the moment which is a good thing obviously there's bumps along the way uh but in general that's one of the key features of the current age is there is no Priestly Guild who controls uh the cannon of knowledge do you think this will continue I mean there there are threats to this this openness and freedom as well well there are definitely threats uh and we do have this risk as we see country after country around the world claiming uh Global uh jurisdiction over there rules are on the internet which leads to more blockages uh a more fragment to the internet and is really against that ideal that Enlightenment ideal that we're all people on this planet trying to learn trying to know trying to understand the world we've been blocked in China for quite some time uh and we're sometimes blocked in other countries and usually it's about some specific information that's true that they don't like remember my teacher is always telling me do not use wikip as a source and it's changed it's changed a bit yeah you know I think it's it's really about challenging that presumption right that Ordinary People people can't participate uh in the knowledge process and it's the idea that you today right now have the right to come and engage with information to engage in that public dialogue about what is true that's a pretty radical idea even for this era that knowledge is open uh that everyone can join in the the the debate the dialogue the chewing the the search for Truth uh and that it isn't just the province of a handful of selected Elites and that idea is very much an enlightenment idea it takes effort it takes thought it takes I mean it's fun yep it's human right he want that and yeah it's sort of like Jimmy Wales is optimistic he believes in the power of the community in a crowd-based Enlightenment but just like the writers of the encycloped most Wikipedia authors are white and male and open dialogue can sometimes turn into a war between editors with authors shutting each other out so what happens if the ideal of democratic communal knowledge fails because of the irrationality of people truth and knowledge the rule of the majority they don't come hand in hand often time the majority opinion is the wrong opinion decrease the noise of uh the uninformed public so I think that's my my elitist attack on on on on equality and democracy how much responsibility can the individual be trusted with it's a fundamental philosophical question which determines the political system we gravitate towards do we want Universal participation or should we be ruled by a single party or a moral and intellectual Elite in pre-revolutionary France Dido worked to overthrow the ruling Elites he spent 3 months in a state prison in vong when he was released he had to pledge never to to produce Blasphemous writings again or else face life in prison in 1751 the first part of the El Secor PD was published containing Dido's Raz a sharp satire against the authorities the entry on cannibalism contained a cross reference to the Eucharist if Catholics consumed the body and blood of Christ during communion doesn't that make them cannibals the entry for King Ruan in French begins with information about the king vulture which he describes as a bird about as fat as a turkey and only afterwards is there any information about the actual King it's very strange because you know rers you know we have no armies um we we have no weapons we have no way of really attacking um Power um except with language biggest fear of dictatorships is freedom if a society is full of free and free thinking people they won't allow themselves to be dictated to and what power dislikes is people who won't accept the narrative that power is trying to [Music] impose what power does like is expanding control and surveillance over its citizens and collecting their [Music] information forensic architecture is a network of Architects and journalists who investigate governments dictators and intelligence agencies that cover up human rights abuses and manipulate evidence based in London they compile data images and videos to reconstruct poison gas attacks or prisons where people are tortured how does forensic architecture compile evidence that will hold up in court Israeli architect Al vitman is the head of the collective s moafi specializes in environmental crimes I've been investigating the legacy of D and he made himself quite unpopular with the church and my guess is that you know towards the the state and the police you you you might not be the most popular people or or is it is like what's your take on kind of going against the powers there are at this point so truth hurts and Truth is also a battlefield right now when you break the State Monopoly over knowledge and say watch out because we can know when you're lying this makes us very unpopular obviously with the people that want to apply violent Assad um the American the the Pentagon U with which we have clashed on several occasions we're fighting against big corporations um so for example we had a case and that we were looking at oil extraction and oil pollution in Argentina it's not always just the state we have have a lot of it's it's a it's a big Frontier that we're fighting number of big powers and in fact from all those people we always hear the same kind of critique we are we are not State authorized to speak the truth but it's exactly that kind of authorization we don't seek so much of the work that you do is is enabled by the Internet by global access by uploading pictures from smartphones etc etc so how do you get data into knowledge the very principle of knowledge and the Very principle of science is a kind of culture of Suspicion and that culture of Suspicion need to be substantiated with a methodology that is built in order to verify claim does the testimony that we heard from several um people that experience violence agree with that video which agrees with the weather report uh which agrees with uh satellite image IM etc etc etc and the more diverse and the more different the perspectives are the more we are confident that the statements that we are making against States and corporations are precise do you see yourselves like walking in Dido footsteps like do you see yourselves as enlighteners we are living in kind of radical post enlightment reality in which um we find that the promise of Enlightenment of governing transparently and justly is precisely the target of our investigations you see what lies behind it is that the state wants to keep its Monopoly over violence and over truth and when those two monopolies unite over violence and over truth you have an unchecked political [Music] situation whenever monopol is on violence and Truth coincide democracy becomes impossible in the 18th century this was called absolutism at almost 60 years old Dido set out on one last big Journey to the court of zarena Katherine II in St Petersburg her rule was considered to be one of enlightened absolutism D wanted to convince her to abolish despotism which would essentially me abolishing herself she told mono that his great principles were beautiful in books but they made for bad practical policy while you write on unfeeling paper she said I write on human skin which is sensitive to the slightest touch Dido's idealism was no match for Katherine's hard-nosed real politic he later returned to Paris disillusioned Oxford University is one of the oldest in the world its students have included philosophers John Lock and Adam Smith physics genius Steven Hawking internet inventor Tim burner Lee US President Bill Clinton people who went on to change the world today the University's future of humanity Institute is tackling big picture questions about Humanity according to to Swedish philosopher and Institute director Nick Bostrom we are on the cusp of perhaps the greatest paradigm shift in human history for the first time we could be replaced by an even more intelligent entity in the form of an artificial super intelligence together with Steven Hawking Elon Musk and others he signed off on a warning to humanity 23 principles for AI research to benefit humankind not harm it so do you want any um coffee or tea I'm good thank you thank you all right do you think super intelligent um artificial intelligence do you think that is a threat to humanity and and the promise as well I it's uh I think a very um unique moment in in the history of Life uh when this happens the creation of General artificial intelligence machines that that attain the same general purpose reasoning ability that current sets us humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom getting that transition right will be maybe the most important task in in this Century you've been quoted saying if a super intelligence decides that it's it's better to wipe All Humans off the planet for some reason or another it it will succeed some people say that that's scare mongering that's just you know blowing out of proportion if you think about what what gives us humans this unique position on the planet like um it's not that we have stronger muscles than other animals or or sharper teeth it's our brains are just slightly differently wired and so similarly if we introduce into the world something radically cognitively Superior to humans then it might well be that the future will be shaped by the values and preferences of this super intelligent stuff uh and so then they they need to make sure we align them with us so that they're kind of an extension of of human values and of human tensions rather than this alien antagonistic Force as part of the Enlightenment human reason is kind of the core of that um in an era where where artificial intelligence has more reason more reasoning capability um than humans is there a need to kind of redefine or look at what it means to be human so right now many people Define their identity in terms of being useful to somebody or something you either the bread winner or you're the mother who raised your children or you're something um but in a world where robots can do everything better yeah it might just not be anything you can do that would be useful a lot of our values and identities you know we need to base them on something different than this kind of instrumentality principle that shapes the current [Music] world and Enlightenment of the 21st century has to help us give new meaning to our existence to redefine what it means to be human adding a fourth chapter to Freud's three famous insults to humanity first cernus showed us that we weren't the center of the universe second Darwin degraded Us by placing Us in the animal kingdom showing that we the so-called crown of creation were basically Apes thirdly Freud himself taught us that we are externally determined by our psychological drives and soon we won't even be the most intelligent beings on the planet what will humans be then what will give us meaning and support in a world where we're [Music] redundant back to the city of WEA banin where I'm at the world's largest Voodoo festival with singer Aiza one of the voodoo Kings has invited us personally to be honest I feel out of place here as a northern European tech nerd something in me Rebels against the idea of voodu being an enlightened ritual wouldn't D have called all of this Superstition or do we Europeans see rituals like these from a heavily biased eurocentric point of view how fundamentally opposed are science and spirituality from each other actually you think everyone needs a spiritual basis of Life absolutely we're not just flesh walking around there's Spirit within and you know the one thing that a lot of people don't understand is Spirit don't see our flesh right they don't see our color Spirit sees your aura and your energy when we stop seeing color and start treating it you know each other differently we'll be fine but till then we got work to do we're here at the Temple of pythons and on straight on the other side of the plaza is a church how do you feel about kind of the two religions meeting in in this way every continent has a piece of the secret to spiritual enlightenment every tribe it's a puzzle and it's been distributed to all the different tribes and we can't figure it out until we bring the entire puzzle together so until so then we're all going to be like my puzzle is the whole thing and another person like no mine is at the end of it all we all have to come together y all of us even the Christians even the Christians even them after the parade we head to the court of the king of weda his majesty d [Music] bpe as a student he left socialist benine and moved to the former East Germany these days he lives most of the year in Berlin and rules his kingdom from there for him there's no doubt that a life without a higher meaning doesn't do justice to Being Human thank you so do you think Voodoo can can provide or be a form of Enlightenment of course the theme of Enlightenment is contained within it with every breath we take the world needs Enlightenment the heart alone is not enough the Mind alone is even worse we need both of them together if you don't know where you've come from how can you know where you're going in July 1784 Den did a ro died without a God and without ceremony once you're gone makes no difference whether you are somebody or nobody he wrote In the End you don't need more than a hole in the ground and for Spruce boards but Dido didn't die without hope he left behind writings that he couldn't publish in his lifetime he thought they would one day change the world so that our grandchildren will not only be more educated but also happier and more virtuous so that we don't die without finding our place among Humanity [Music] D Ro's Legacy lives on in the joy of scientific knowledge and his steadfast skepticism of authority to question those claiming to have a monopoly on truth based on Dogma or alternative facts be they from religion large corporations or demagogues the enlightenment says progress is in our hands and that means so is regress it's up to us as you go through life and the world around you shifts and changes and you're trying to make sense of it for me writing is that act of understanding nobody has the absolute truth not even science so we must maintain a position of acceptance and respect for those who think differently believe differently or love differently we still have things we don't understand and so before Darwin came along it required a major leap of courage to say no we don't actually need a great big designer in the sky to explain it the remaining problems that we face like the origin of the universe the origin of life actually too will be solved an Enlightenment for the 21st century has to confront the complexity of the world without being Satisfied by simple answers ins edias can no longer be Universal repositories of knowledge knowledge has to keep evolving just as we humans have to keep questioning ourselves at the dawn of the age of super intelligence we're realizing that we're more than just rational beings who Define themselves solely in terms of [Music] utility for me this is all part of the education of the future we need to know where we've come come from in order to better understand where this journey will take us
No comments:
Post a Comment