The Future of Public Knowledge

Colleagues,

The next Columbus Futurists public forum will be Thursday August 14 at 12:00 pm noon (eastern). Our topic of discussion will be "The Future of Public Knowledge."

The cultural critic Ted Gioia argues that we are living through an unrecognized but massive historic transformation: the collapse of the modern knowledge system. Traditional sources of authority—academia, science, journalism, and tech—are losing credibility due to replication failures, expert distrust, AI hallucinations, plagiarism, collapsing universities, and pervasive scandal. This collapse, Gioia contends, mirrors past historical revolutions in thought, such as the Renaissance or Romanticism. What comes next, he suggests, may be a new system rooted not in technocracy but in enduring human values—art, philosophy, and truth that serves human flourishing rather than control.