Something does not add up.We know more than any generation before us. We have more data, more research, more publications, more experts, more access to information than any civilization in history. And yet: the sense of orientation has not increased with the knowledge. If anything, the opposite has occurred. The more we know, the less we seem to understand — what is happening, why it is happening, and what, if anything, can be done. This is not a complaint about “information overload” or “the complexity of the modern world.” Those are descriptions of symptoms. The question is whether there is a structure beneath the symptoms — something that explains not just that we are disoriented but why, and why the disorientation seems to deepen precisely as the knowledge grows. The observation is available to anyone who looks honestly: armed conflicts are at their highest number since the Second World War. Trust in institutions — governments, science, media, international organizations — declines simultaneously across the globe. Political discourse oscillates between aggressive polarization and retreating insularity. The scientific enterprise, designed to transform opinion into tested knowledge, is itself under pressure — publication volume grows exponentially while the capacity for genuine verification does not keep pace. And the most powerful new technology — generative artificial intelligence — multiplies the productionof plausible-sounding content at a rate that dwarfs any human capacity to check it. None of this is news. All of it is known. And that is precisely the point: knowing it does not seem to help. We know about the crises. We know about the risks. We know about the erosion of the institutions that were built to address crises and risks. And the knowing — the sheer volume of knowledge about the problems — does not translate into the capacity to address them. Why not?
Markus Killius (Thu,) studied this question.