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 motivated by the potential of Generative Foundation Models (opens in new tab) (GFMs), 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.

In 2023, Glen Weyl, the Research Lead of the PTC announced the start of a co-authored book on Plurality (opens in new tab). With the help of close collaborators and the open source community, this story was written, and the book was published in May 2024 in multiple physical and digital formats, and is currently being translated and re-adopted in multiple languages. Glen is currently on a global book tour, visiting dozens of countries to speak on behalf of this book. Please consider following Glen and his work on social media (opens in new tab) for the latest!

Our collaborators

We are working closely with the following collaborators: