TOK situations for knowledge and technology
How technologies store, filter, generate and distribute knowledge, and what changes when the tool that finds an answer also decides which answers you were shown.
- East Asia
Move 37
In its 2016 match against Lee Sedol, AlphaGo played a move professional commentators initially called a mistake and later called beautiful, a line no human…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- Southeast Asia
The city the lasers found under the jungle
Airborne laser scanning over Angkor stripped away the canopy digitally and revealed a vast low-density urban sprawl around the temples, overturning estimates…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Global
The proof no human has read
The 1976 proof of the four colour theorem relied on computer checking of hundreds of case configurations that no mathematician could verify by hand, and parts…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Certainty
- Justification
- India
When a region goes offline
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling,…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Southeast Asia
When the platform is the public square
In several Southeast Asian countries, a single social platform effectively is the internet for much of the population, and investigations after episodes of…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
A museum for art with no artist
A museum devoted entirely to AI-generated art opened in Los Angeles in 2026, while courts have held that copyright protects works of human authorship, leaving…
Current · The arts
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- East Asia
A national border for information
China's filtering infrastructure produces an internet where searches, encyclopedias and archives return different results than elsewhere, and a generation has…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture