So, what’s the plan?
Over the past six months, we’ve conducted interviews across the Topos community, and drafted and re-drafted our 2021–2024 strategic plan, so that we can coordinate effectively around a shared strategy as well as a shared vision. We’d like to share that plan with you all today.
At Topos, our vision is a world where the systems that surround us benefit us all. We seek to move the world closer to this vision by playing a role in the ecosystem that builds systems technologies—in particular, by advancing new fundamental sciences of connection and integration.
But what does this mean in practice? How do we translate this shared vision and mission into what we do day to day at Topos, as a community? Over the past six months, we’ve conducted interviews across the Topos community, and drafted and re-drafted our 2021–2024 strategic plan, so that we can coordinate effectively around a shared strategy as well as a shared vision.
We’d like to share that plan with you all today: you can see it here.
Underlying this plan is an emerging theory of change, built in three parts. Technology is a major lever in the world. Information technology, in particular, has rapidly reshaped society and the planet over the past two decades: knowledge is at our fingertips; our entire social circles are just an instant message or video call away; society interacts through personalised, social media.
We believe new technology will continue to make these large differences in our lives. But effective, powerful technologies are based on deep insight and understanding, expressed through mathematics and refined through empirical science. As our lives are increasingly connected by, and contingent on, systems such as the internet, AI infrastructure, or the climate, we believe we must build our systems technologies on a robust mathematics of systems. This theory should answer basic questions about the nature of interaction, communication, the relationships between parts and wholes.
And overall, all of this work must be deeply intertwined with public benefit, grounded in a clear sense of our values and our impacts. These values must run through the entire endeavour, informing everything from our choice of research questions, to the communities and incentives we engage with, to our diligence in understanding and anticipating potential technological impacts and adjusting our scientific course accordingly.
In summary, then, our plan for impact is:
- Create a new mathematical systems science that rigorously addresses fundamental questions about the nature of communication, cooperation, and integrated cognition.
- Deploy this science through building publicly-oriented tools, including software and user interfaces, to create long-term, sustainable technology and social structures that provide a foundation for solving global problems such as safe AI or coordination around climate change.
- Ensure public benefit from this new technology through anticipation and analysis of its societal impacts and through public engagement.
In this strategic plan, we highlight four interdependent strategic goals that will allow us to execute this plan for impact. They concern (1) fundamental research, (2) societal impact, (3) ethical action, and (4) institutional strength. Our plan describes the various aspects of these four goals in detail. Each goal is given equal emphasis and is tightly intertwined with all others; we can only achieve our mission through success in all four areas.
This strategic plan coordinates us, but importantly, we seek never to cease refining and improving it. We share it publicly in order to gather feedback, and to invite you to be involved.