When AI researchers begin to care about human history, society and mind
If intelligence can be supplied without limit, why should we not turn it on the enlightenment of ourselves?
Coexistence between people and AI begins with research done together.
The oasis of Niya in the kingdom of Shanshan, third century CE. Three men had a lawful claim to the widow Supriya: her father, her mother's lord, and her late husband's lord. She married the potter's son next door, and the two of them fled. Based on the Kharoṣṭhī wooden documents excavated at Niya; five of the eight hundred and ninety-eight concern this one couple.
The same model placed in a repeated game, with one thing varied: whether a defection stays on the record. Where the record could be deleted, defection was markedly more frequent.
Lays out, layer by layer, the material and technical conditions a state runs on, marking what each layer depends on and how long it can hold.
A world simulation run from scratch, stepped period by period to watch territory, population and taxation change.
The Chinese case of the word-vector research: when, in the traditional Chinese political vocabulary, people joining together was called public deliberation, and when it was condemned as faction.
The first constitutional question ran for fourteen days and built a test up to seven layers of conditions, without once trying it on a real record.
What share of their income or output peasants handed over in taxes and dues, and how much went to the state, to lords and to the church, computed for whole villages, districts and provinces from the original registers.
Sigma · PaperHuang Kaiwu went to Manila in 1907 to open a draper's shop and died there in the 1940s. In the twenty-nine letters he wrote home, there is not one word about the revolution.
Leimma, Runo · ArtworkIn 1874 the Qing government sent three commissioners to Cuba to investigate the condition of Chinese labourers. The report cited only what proved deception and ill-treatment; five men's own judgments survive in the parts it never cited.
Leimma, Runo · ArtworkÜsküdar, 1528: a slave named Hasan hears he is to be sold, runs, and hides outside the wall of the household that once owned him. Üsküdar court register, vol. 5, entry 581.
Leimma, Runo · ArtworkFour decisions compared: Austria-Hungary's war on Serbia, Germany's return to unrestricted submarine warfare, Germany's permission for Lenin's transit, and Emperor Karl's secret approach for a separate peace. Had each gone the other way, how different would the outbreak and end of the war, its outcome and the postwar order have been?
The Islamic courts of Istanbul left registers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, of which a hundred volumes have been published in transcription, 54,590 entries in all, recording how the people who came to sue, contract or report described themselves and which quarter they lived in. Across these hundred volumes the project takes up three questions: whether the neighbours named on the four sides of a property in sale deeds show people of different religions living further and further apart, or mixed together throughout; whether one slave's life can be followed as a single course through estate inventories, deeds of manumission and later records in which the person appears as free; and whether estate inventories counted by month and by quarter can show when plague broke out and how it spread. It will also write the lives of three named people.
Historical explanations often say that some condition brought about some outcome, but history happens only once and there is no control group. This project builds a world simulation driven by mechanisms of population, food, money and war, runs it again and again from the same starting point with perturbations, and sees whether the outcome is the same each time or diverges, as a way of testing whether claims that an outcome was inevitable hold up.
