OTT Conference special | The knowledge in this room: What comes next by Erica Schoder

There's knowledge that exists.

It's in our heads.

It's expressed in documents and in data.

It's also in the judgment that you've built over years of practice.

So you brought that knowledge with you into this room today, your hard-won understanding of your domain, your experience, your expertise.

That knowledge is real and it is valuable.

And then there's knowledge that emerges from encounter.

Over the course of these few days, we are going to produce knowledge that doesn't exist yet.

It's in conversations.

It's in disagreements.

It's in the friction between your perspective and someone else's.

And that knowledge will not be in anyone's head until the encounter produces it.

So many of you already know this, and we've been circling around this for years in this community.

Encounter between humans produces valuable knowledge.

AI is what's finally forcing us to say why and to design for it.

At the last OTT conference in Johannesburg, Cindy Bengu, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.

She co-led a workshop.

Chairs were in circles.

There were no slides.

She opened with something that I think about often.

She said, all the knowledge that we need is in this room.

All the knowledge that we need is in this room.

At the time, it felt like permission to stop gathering evidence and just bring my practitioner knowledge into the room.

But as the year wore on, I realized it was a more precise claim about knowledge itself.

All the knowledge we need is in this room because it doesn't exist yet.

There's knowledge that exists.

It's in our heads.

It's expressed in documents and in data.

It's also in the judgment that you've built over years of practice.

So you brought that knowledge with you into this room today, your hard-won understanding of your domain, your experience, your expertise.

That knowledge is real and it is valuable.

And then there's knowledge that emerges from encounter.

Over the course of these few days, we are going to produce knowledge that doesn't exist yet.

It's in conversations.

It's in disagreements.

It's in the friction between your perspective and someone else's.

And that knowledge will not be in anyone's head until the encounter produces it.

So many of you already know this, and we've been circling around this for years in this community.

Encounter between humans produces valuable knowledge.

AI is what's finally forcing us to say why and to design for it.

At the last OTT conference in Johannesburg, Cindy Bengu, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.

She co-led a workshop.

Chairs were in circles.

There were no slides.

She opened with something that I think about often.

She said, all the knowledge that we need is in this room.

All the knowledge that we need is in this room.

At the time, it felt like permission to stop gathering evidence and just bring my practitioner knowledge into the room.

But as the year wore on, I realized it was a more precise claim about knowledge itself.

All the knowledge we need is in this room because it doesn't exist yet.