<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/nov/18/what-ai-doesnt-know-global-knowledge-collapse>
"A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which
meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic
when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor
in western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in traditional
remedies. Having grown up in a small town in India, I am accustomed to rituals.
My dad had a ritual, too. Every time we visited his home village in southern
Tamil Nadu, he’d get a bottle of thick, pungent, herb-infused oil from a
vaithiyar, a traditional doctor practising Siddha medicine. It was his way of
maintaining his connection with the kind of medicine he had always known and
trusted.
Dad’s tumour showed signs of being malignant, so the hospital doctors and my
sister strongly recommended surgery. My parents were against the idea, worried
it could affect my dad’s speech. This is usually where I come in, as the expert
mediator in the family. Like any good millennial, I turned to the internet for
help in guiding the decision. After days of thorough research, I (as usual)
sided with my sister and pushed for surgery. The internet backed us up.
We eventually got my dad to agree and even set a date. But then, he slyly used
my sister’s pregnancy as a distraction to skip the surgery altogether. While we
pestered him every day to get it done, he was secretly taking his herbal
concoction. And, lo and behold, after several months the tumour actually shrank
and eventually disappeared. The whole episode earned my dad some bragging
rights.
At the time, I dismissed it as a lucky exception. But recently I’ve been
wondering if I was too quick to dismiss my parents’ trust in traditional
knowledge, while accepting the authority of digitally dominant sources. I find
it hard to believe that my dad’s herbal concoctions worked, but I have also
come to realise that the seemingly all-knowing internet I so readily trusted
contains huge gaps – and that, in a world of AI, it’s about to get worse.
The irony isn’t lost on me that this dilemma has emerged through my research at
a university in the United States, in a setting removed from my childhood and
the very context where traditional practices were part of daily life. At
Cornell University, New York, I study what it takes to design responsible AI
systems. My work has been revealing, showing me how the digital world reflects
profound power imbalances in knowledge, and how this is amplified by generative
AI (GenAI). The early internet was dominated by the English language and
western institutions, and this imbalance has hardened over time, leaving whole
worlds of human knowledge and experience undigitised. Now, with the rise of
GenAI – which is trained on this available digital corpus – that asymmetry
threatens to become entrenched.
For many people, GenAI is emerging as the primary way to learn about the world.
A large-scale study published in September 2025, analysing how people have been
using ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, revealed that around half the
queries were for practical guidance, or to seek information. These systems may
appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege
dominant ways of knowing (typically western and institutional) while
marginalising alternatives, especially those encoded in oral traditions,
embodied practice and languages considered “low-resource” in the computing
world, such as Hindi or Swahili.
By amplifying these hierarchies, GenAI risks contributing to the erasure of
systems of understanding that have evolved over centuries, disconnecting future
generations from vast bodies of insight and wisdom that were never encoded yet
remain essential, human ways of knowing. What’s at stake, then, isn’t just
representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
