Plural Technology Collaboratory
Overview
The Plural Technology Collaboratory is a Microsoft Research Special Project dedicated to advancing Plural Technologies (PTs), ones that support social diversity and empower collaboration across it.
The PTC is a relaunch of the previous Decentralized Social Technology Collaboratory motivated by the potential of Generative Foundation Models (opens in new tab) (GFMs), such as GPT-4, to become general-purpose technology, comparable to electricity or computation, that emerge into broad use far faster than either of those examples. They have the capacity to reshape and disrupt most of our society, including the economy, politics, governance, social structures, and the organization of production. Persevering and empowering pluralism in the face of this disruption will require fundamental sociotechnical change that we aim to develop technology to support.
Our areas of focus
Microsoft researchers will be working with collaborators globally to study, design and deploy PTs, focused on the following pillars:
Verifiability and provenance
Economy
Politics and governance
Organization of production
Our collaborators
We are working closely with the following collaborators:
