CONCEPT
The Computational Enlightenment
The term this volume proposes for the 2020s channel expansion that large language models produced — structurally parallel to the Industrial Enlightenment but compressed from centuries into years, and requiring an equivalent institutional response at equivalent scale.
The Computational Enlightenment names the AI transition as a channel expansion of the same structural type as the Industrial Enlightenment — a radical reduction in the cost of converting propositional knowledge into prescriptive capability, with corresponding implications for who can participate in the application of human knowledge to practical problems. The Industrial Enlightenment made planetary mechanics accessible to anyone who could turn an orrery's handle. The Computational Enlightenment makes the accumulated knowledge of human civilization accessible to anyone who can form a question in natural language. The parallel is structural: both transitions expanded the population of participants in the knowledge economy by orders of magnitude, both produced exhilarating early gains, and both — if the historical pattern holds — will require institutional innovations of the same kind, and at the same urgency, as the scientific societies, patent systems, and educational reforms that made the first Enlightenment's gains broadly shared.
