Between utopian optimism and dystopian pessimism: navigating the roles of universities in knowledge democracies

Abstract More than three decades ago, the spread of the internet and the emergence of search engines inspired social scientists to develop optimistic, even utopian, narratives about the dramatically enhanced opportunities they provided the average citizen (as a voter, consumer, student or tourist) to access and share information. The vision of a dramatically more equal and transparent ‘cyberdemocracy’, in which facts would triumph over political propaganda and an abundance of information would hopefully make democratic debate more rational, has been replaced by pessimistic — some might say dystopian — visions of the devaluation of facts and expertise, and of public debates that are increasingly detached from facts and truth. Recently, these developments have accelerated. The advent of AI and AI-driven applications is causing a fundamental shift in how information is generated, distributed, assessed, and used. In this paper, we examine these developments and consider the role that universities can and should play in advanced, increasingly AI-driven knowledge democracies. We argue that the challenge to the established authority of academic knowledge poses risks and opportunities for universities, and that they must reinvent their roles if they are to continue to be crucial catalysts of innovation.