Substrate ↑ · population culture
Mass literacy
Governance, democratic oversight, and consumer behaviour all fail in AI because citizens cannot evaluate the domain; population-scale literacy conditions every other lever.
Mechanism
Invest at population scale in AI literacy (how models work, where they err, what governance levers exist, what participation looks like).
If it succeeds: what binds next
Citizens can evaluate AI. The binding problem becomes whether elite and public evaluations converge or diverge, and what happens when they differ.
A strategy that produces a worse next problem than the one it solved has not done durable work.
Falsification signal
High measured literacy produces no behavioural change on consumer and voting choices by 2030.
A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.
Self-undermining threshold
overshoot riskWhen literate populations interact with AI daily regardless.
Produces ambient mediation rather than informed resistance.
Every strategy has a stable region where it reinforces itself and an unstable region where pursuit defeats it. The threshold between them is usually narrower than advocates acknowledge.
Addresses 2 failure scenarios
all scenarios →Load-bearing commitments
Worldview positions this strategy quietly assumes. If the claim fails empirically or philosophically, the strategy loses its target or its premise.
Citizens can be trained to evaluate AI-related claims at scale.
Fails if: If the gap between expert and public grows faster than curriculum, training never catches up.
Coordinates
Conflicts, grouped by mechanism
0No strict conflicts catalogued. This strategy pulls a lever that nothing else pulls in the opposite direction.
Complements, grouped by mechanism
5Same phase, different layer
same stage, distinct leversBoth are active in the same phase of the transition but act on different layers (model vs institution vs culture). They cover different failure modes inside the same window.
Same-side diversification
same side, different leverBoth act on the same side (AI or world) but pull distinct levers. They cover several failure modes on that side while leaving the other side uncovered.
Same-lever twins
1Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.
Axis position
Source note: Mass literacy strategy.md