Knowledge Artifacts

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Think of civilization as a collection of artifacts—not just physical tools and technologies, but knowledge itself crystallized into tangible forms. Our political institutions are artifacts. Our moral codes are artifacts. Our ways of life, our personal aspirations, even the values we hold dear—all artifacts we've constructed to solve problems and navigate uncertainty. The physicist David Deutsch argues that these knowledge artifacts must continuously evolve if we're to survive the inevitable catastrophes ahead.

Consider what we're actually building. When physicists Martin Rees and Steven Hawking advise that we hedge our bets by moving into space, they're talking about creating new artifacts: spacecraft, habitats, survival systems. But even those won't save us from every threat. A gamma-ray burst, thousands of times rarer than an asteroid collision, would still wipe us out without vastly more scientific knowledge—and the technological artifacts that knowledge enables.