Knowledge production, sharing, and design in an age of fundamental transformations

Knowledge is a central constituent of the societal infrastructure. Knowledge is produced, interchanged, represented, and used for different purposes. In societies, where tangible or intangible artifacts are essential elements of the interaction of humans with the environment, knowledge is a central piece of the reasoning and realization mechanisms of artifacts. In turn, those artifacts can become a source of knowledge production. It is not a human specificity to produce, share, use, or transmit knowledge. Several studies have demonstrated that species such as whales enjoy this capability too (Whitehead et al., 2021). This means that producing and sharing knowledge is associated with social interactions both for humans and whales’ groups. On the contrary, social interactions of extremely large groups and the capacity to interact and collaborate with distant, unknown fellows is probably a human specificity. This collaboration implies the sharing of knowledge in a format ensuring diffusion and interchange. But what is happening when a new phenomenon such as knowledge produced by machines can become a reality? Is this extended collaboration remaining human specificity? Professor Horvath with his paper titled “On Reasonable Inquiry and Analysis Domains of Sympérasmology", clears the way by providing an interesting contribution to the theory of synthetic system knowledge (SSK). His contribution opens a new area of investigation permitted by complex systems and their capacity to produce knowledge and use it intelligently. For us humans, all those elements can be the source of apparent intractable complexity. When faced with the emergence of complex phenomena, a seductive vision of complexity as an emergent, autoorganizing phenomenon is prevalent in multiple communities and crosses multiple domains of sciences such as computing science or economy. Self-organization as such is an interesting line of research but considering that complexity and self-organization can take care of themselves, and without a deep understanding of the multiple interactions, complex control and adaptation is a detrimental approach and can be the source of negative impacts. It is dangerous to see self-organization as an assumed self-organizing property of complex systems. This is, for example, a commonly adopted perspective in the mainstream economic school of thought. Another example is the behaviour of the Internet that gives the illusion of robust self-organizing structures despite high uncertainty in the environment itself. The reality is that for those systems complexity is hidden and that sophisticated control and adaptation procedures of designed systems exist. Complexity can and should be designed. This can be supported by providing a leading role in the design process to the description of the environment of the system. This is an approach favoured by multiple