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     This demonstration built on years of work and multistakeholder collaborations including AI4Bharat, Karya and IVR Junction, which have employed Indians to gather data on local languages, harnessed these data to empower LLMs to translate across these languages and connected illiterate Indians with access only to simple feature phones to connect to a "voice-based internet". Together these hold the promise of helping preserve and strengthen the cultural diversity of India by ensuring those who speak less prominent languages and live far from cities are still able to access the public services they need to sustain their ways of life.

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/farmer.png" width="100%" alt="Indian farmers looking at a mobile phone">
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/farmer.jpg" width="100%" alt="Indian farmers looking at a mobile phone">
Courtesy of Microsoft


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26 changes: 14 additions & 12 deletions contents/english/07-01-conclusion.md
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# Conclusion

Throughout this book, we have tried to make the case for a society that honors pluralism, and for technology that promotes and sustains it. If you share that vision, join us in the movement for Plurality.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This book describes a vision for the future of technology and society that we hope is ambitious and serious enough to be real competitor to, but will be more attractive to most readers than, that developed by libertarians and technocrats. If we are right and you share that vision, join us in the movement for ⿻.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our concrete aspirations match our ambitious vision. By 2030, ⿻ will be as recognizable to people around the globe as a direction for technology as AI or blockchain are and as recognizable as a political movement as the Green movement. People will expect their democracy to progress as rapidly as their devices. They will see Taiwan as a guiding light and symbol for ⿻ and thus as important to the thriving of ⿻ as Israel is for the Jewish people or as Ukraine is for freedom in Europe. People around the world will find surprising allies and heroes through ⿻, like those concerned about authoritarian expansionism coming to admire a transgender Taiwanese leader on the front lines of that conflict and those seeking more ⿻ technology finding allies among the devout.


We have bold aspirations. By 2030, people around the world should see Taiwan as a guiding light for pluralism, and its flourishing as critical to the West as that of Israel or Ukraine. People will expect their democracy to progress as quickly as their smartphones. “Plurality” will be as recognizable to polities around the globe as the green movement, or AI.

### The Stakes

Technology is the most powerful force in our world today. Whether or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or voraciously, or agree with the companies and policymakers that have shaped its development to date, it remains our single greatest lever to shape society going forward.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world. Whether or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or voraciously, or agree with the companies and policymakers that have shaped its development to date, it remains our single greatest lever to shape our collective future.

By “society,” as we have argued throughout this book, we mean not just each of us individually but also the webs of relationships that connect us. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That collective is not simply a group of individuals but a fabric of relationships. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.

Technology has had a dramatic effect on those connections. From the railroad to the telegraph to the telephone, to Facebook connecting us to old kindergarten friends and new like-minded allies, to Zoom holding businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enormously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human connection.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Technology drives and defines those connections. From the railroad to the telegraph to the telephone, to social media connecting us to old kindergarten friends and new like-minded allies, to teleconferencing holding businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enormously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human connection while honoring our differences.

At the same time, technology has also clearly driven us apart. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and practically unfettered mis- and disinformation. As AI proliferates through our economy and our lives, it promises to radically increase technology’s effects, good and bad.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppress our differences. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and practically unfettered mis- and disinformation. The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage and created a global monoculture As a new generation of technologies including GFMs and augmented reality spreads through our lives, it promises to radically increase technology’s effects, good and bad.

We now stand at a crossroads. Whether technology will steer us closer together or further apart will define the next phase of human experience. For the moment—but not for much longer—the choice of which way we go is up to us.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus we stand at a crossroads. Technology could drive us apart, sowing chaos and conflict that bring down social order. It could suppress the human diversity that is its lifeblood, homogenizing us in a singular technical vision. Or it could dramatically enrich our diversity while strengthening the ties across it, harnessing and sustaining the potential energy of ⿻.

Some have cast the question of technology’s future as a fight between accelerationism and decelerationism. The governance implosion at OpenAI in late 2023 popularized this frame, putting CEO Sam Altman in the first camp and his erstwhile nonprofit board in the second. In our view, however, this distinction is moot: decelerationism can’t win.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Some would seek to avoid this choice by slamming on the breaks, decelerating technological progress. Yet, while of course some directions are unwise and there are limits to how rapidly we should proceed into the unknown, the dynamics of competition and geopolitics makes simply slowing progress unlikely to be sustainable. Instead, we face a choice of directions more than velocity.

Instead, as we argued earlier in this book, there are two looming accelerationist scenarios, each with its own advocates: entrepreneurial sovereignty and abundance technocracy. The first camp, including executives and investors like Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinavasan, wants to “liberate individuals to be wholly atomistic agentsfree of constraint, conscience, or responsibility. The second, including Reid Hoffman and Sam Altman, believes that unfettered technological advance can solve humanity’s problems, and that they have the wisdom to decide how it will do so.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Should we, as libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinavasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities? Should we, as technocrats like Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman would have us do, allow technologists to solve our problems, plan our future and distribute to us the material comfort it creates?

Given a choice between these alternatives, the urgent, passionate answer of this book is: neither. We pluralists believe that most human beings are neither atomized individuals without shared responsibilities nor subjects without a claim to agency. On the whole, human beings are both individuals and social beings, desirous of full lives and capable of sustained peace. But to achieve those goals we need our surrounding systems—the political _and_ the technological ones—to give us both agency and responsibility. And we certainly need the most powerful tools at our disposal to help us find ways to get along, even if not to agree. That is the aspiration and the imperative of Plurality.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We say, loudly and clearly, neither! Both chaos and top-down order are the antitheses not just of democracy and freedom, but of all life, complexity and beauty in human society and nature. Life and ⿻ thrive in the narrow corridor on the "edge of chaos". For life on this planet to survive and thrive, it must be the central mission of technology and politics to widen this corridor, to steer us constantly back towards that edge of chaos where growth and ⿻ are possible. That is the aspiration and the imperative of .

Plurality is the third way beyond libertarianism and technocracy. It is a movement we have perhaps three to five years to set in motion. Within that time frame, a critical mass of the technology that people and companies use every day will have become deeply dependent on AI models. At that point, we won’t be able to reverse the “reality” that entrepreneurial sovereignty and abundance technocracy have generated for us. But between now and then, we can mobilize to re-chart the course: toward a human-centered, relationship-embracing, digital democracy in which diverse groups of people, despite not agreeing, are able to cooperate and collaborate in sustained and thriving societies.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;is thus the third way beyond libertarianism and technocracy, just as the life is the third way beyond rigid order and chaos. It is a movement we have perhaps three to five years to set in motion. Within that time frame, a critical mass of the technology that people and companies use every day will have become deeply dependent on "AI" and "the metaverse". At that point, we won’t be able to reverse the *fait accompli* that technocracy and libertarianism have generated for us. But between now and then, we can mobilize to re-chart the course: toward a human-centered, relationship-embracing, digital democracy in which diverse groups of people, precisely because they do not agree, are able to cooperate and collaborate to constantly push our imaginations and aspirations forward.

Such a pivot will take a whole-of-society mobilization. Businesses, governments, universities, and civil society organizations must demand that our technology deepen our connections across our many forms of social diversity. That is the key, and the only path, to strengthening human stability, prosperity, and flourishing into the future.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Such a pivot will take a whole-of-society mobilization. Businesses, governments, universities, and civil society organizations must demand that our technology deepen our connections across our many forms of social diversity. That is the key, and the only path, to strengthening human stability, prosperity, and flourishing into the future.

As we described in “The Lost Dao,” this vision could have been the dominant ethos of the Internet. Founders and pioneers like JCR Licklider at ARPA and Robert W. Taylor at Xerox imagined replacing the world’s centralized, linear, and atomized structures with more federated, networked relationships and governance. Instead, the tech giants we know today, along with players like Cisco, AOL, PayPal, and others, defined the emerging building blocks of the Internet completely. From networking to storage and computation to identity to user interface to payments and more, the form of the Internet reflects private incentives rather public values.

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