What Do We Owe the Knowledge Ecosystem? Reflections from the Knowledge Futures Symposium by Seonju Yang

We live in an era of information abundance. I can access more information in one afternoon than most of the past generation could in a lifetime. Some of them probably never imagined it would be possible. But is that abundance really a good thing? That question stayed with me through the whole Knowledge Futures Symposium in Leeds, and by the end of the day it had grown into a harder one: as future Information Professionals, how are we meant to guide people through an ocean of information that keeps getting bigger, faster, and harder to verify?

As a Library and Information Management student on the verge of starting my career, I came away with far more questions than answers.

Whose knowledge counts?

Rashik Parmar opened with a reminder that still feels urgent: 37% of humanity is still offline. Any conversation about "the future of knowledge" that ignores this number is only talking about a fraction of the world. He spoke about the need to put real boundaries on how we use AI tools and was clear that human review still matters. AI shouldn't be treated as a replacement for judgement, only ever support it. His closing thought stuck with me: knowledge is a living ecosystem, not a static resource to be mined.

Tony Ageh followed with a talk on knowledge security and the growing threats to trust, resilience, and accountability — misinformation, bias, and disinformation among them. What struck me most, though, was a smaller point about vocabulary. Readers became users and became customers. Knowledge, science, art, and humanity became "content." Small word changes, but they signal something bigger about what we think we owe each other. Real trust and accountability, or just a transaction.

The hidden labour behind AI

A theme that came up again and again was invisible labour. Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy opened the panel on the future of knowledge production by reminding us that context matters, where information and knowledge come from shapes what we can trust. He pointed out that AI is built by humans and still needs human judgement. Even though humans aren't always good at judging which means we need judgement about the judgement. He also spoke about the need to make this hidden labour visible again, since so much of the human work behind AI systems stays hidden.

Rosalyn Metz went further, describing how AI conceals the human work behind it in very concrete terms. Building good metadata for countless data that AI collects is often the hardest and most hidden part of any AI system. When asked what university libraries need most right now in dealing with AI, her answer was authenticity. Being honest with people about what's human-made, what's AI-generated, and how the two are blended. She also warned against "AI washing": overstating what these tools can actually do, concealing the human labour behind them, and letting corporate messaging do the framing for us. One line from that panel has stayed with me since: AI can assess, predict, and deal with possibilities, but only humans can genuinely share knowledge, retrospective and learn from the past. They are, in her words, different operating paradigms entirely, not competing in versions of the same thing.

Losing languages, losing knowledge

The panel on knowledge equity was the one that sat with me longest. Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur asked a simple but powerful question. What knowledge should be preserved, and whose knowledge actually gets presented? Right now, you largely need to read and write in English to access the world's information infrastructure, which quietly gatekeeps everyone who doesn't. Large language models are trained overwhelmingly on written, colonial-language text, which means entire oral and minority-language knowledge systems are barely represented at all. As one speaker put it, we don't know what we're losing until we've already lost it, and we still have agency to change that if we choose to. Climate displacement was raised as a more immediate version of the same problem: when a community is forced to relocate, the knowledge tied to that place can simply stop being transmitted, with nowhere left to hold it.

Dr. Mac-Anthony Cobblah and Ry Moran, joining the same panel, framed this as a question of hierarchy as much as access. The knowledge system we've inherited ranks some forms of knowing above others, and changing that starts with changing our own mindset away from assuming “the mainstream” is neutral.

Where does that leave us?

Dawn Freshwater's closing keynote tied it together. She spoke about anti-colonialism and how colonial patterns of knowledge don't disappear so much as mutate, quietly erasing outliers as they go. She used a phrase that's stayed with me. The "intelligent peasant". People whose labour is used cheaply and invisibly to build these systems, while they themselves can't afford access to the high-end tools that labour helps create. Her question for the room was how we make knowledge more approachable, and more pro-human, in response. Her answer went beyond access alone: we need trust, reliability, equity, security, authenticity, and resilience, built together. And ultimately, we all need to take ownership, come out of the shadow, and lead the knowledge ecosystem ourselves, rather than waiting for someone else to.

That's the line I keep returning to. As someone about to start a career in libraries and information management, I don't think "knowledge equity" can just be a value I hold quietly. It has to be something I actively practice. In how I evaluate sources, how I explain AI's limits to the people I interact with, and how I push back on the assumption that "mainstream" means “neutral”.  Information professionals aren't neutral stewards standing behind the desk. We're in the best position to notice when a knowledge system is quietly leaving people out and to actually do something about it.

I was born in the late 90s, which makes me part of the last generation to remember both an offline and an online childhood. That's a strange, useful position to hold onto as this field changes. The symposium was enlightening, thought-provoking, and genuinely inspiring. I'm grateful for the student bursary that made it possible. It's exactly the kind of exposure I think every LIS student should get in their studies.