AI: Summary
The session examined how a future wisdom library might be realized through XR, spatial interfaces, and open metadata, focusing on how knowledge systems could remain fluid, contextual, and revisable rather than fixed, authoritative, or purely archival, with books, documents, and libraries treated as evolving participants in a broader ecosystem of understanding rather than static endpoints.
AI: Highlights
Frode emphasized the deliberate provocation of the phrase Ultimate Wisdom Library, clarifying that wisdom is not contained in systems but emerges through interaction with them.
Fabien highlighted embodied protocols from the Imaginary Institute as a way to deliberately disrupt habitual thinking and expand imagination through participation and discomfort.
Peter underscored that authority control must remain provisional and probabilistic, since identities, authorship, and classifications can change with new evidence.
Rob articulated a layered model in which data, information, and knowledge sit inside a surrounding field of wisdom, reinforcing that wisdom is contextual rather than stored.
There were no remarks addressed directly to Assistant.
AI: Insights
Wisdom was reframed as a dynamic process rather than an attribute of collections, suggesting that systems should privilege change, disagreement, and revision over stability.
Books were understood as highly successful focus devices, whose strength lies in linearity and design, while their limitations emerge when context and connections are hidden.
XR was positioned not as a replacement for reading but as an external structuring space where relationships, histories, and alternatives can coexist without disrupting focus.
Serendipity was identified as a fragile but essential property of knowledge discovery, often lost in algorithmic systems but potentially recoverable through spatial arrangement.
Metadata clarity was seen as enabling freedom of representation rather than enforcing standardization, allowing many views over the same underlying material.
Disagreement among experts was recognized as a sign of healthy knowledge production, undermining the notion of a single authoritative or hive-mind perspective.
The tension between imagined systems and real data highlighted the necessity of working with existing, imperfect documents to discover meaningful affordances.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Imaginary Institute — https://imaginary.institute — mentioned by Fabien
Vrije Universiteit Brussel — https://www.vub.be — mentioned by Fabien
Zotero — https://www.zotero.org — mentioned by Fabien and Mark
CSL JSON — https://citationstyles.org — mentioned by Fabien
BibTeX — http://www.bibtex.org — mentioned by Mark
Federated Wiki — http://fed.wiki.org — mentioned by Frode
Literary Machines (book by Ted Nelson) — mentioned by Mark
Edward Tufte — https://www.edwardtufte.com — mentioned by Mark
Peak Human (book) — mentioned by Frode
Experimental: Music Summary for Podcasts listening:
This track started as a meeting on The Future Text Lab website futuretextlab.info which was then transcribed (sonix.ai) and then summarized using AI for the website, including an AI summary in song lyrics which was then orchestrated by AI (suno.com). This is an experiment around a different aspect of text, to see if a more poetic, though machine made, presentation of what was discussed can spur thought and dialog.