Plural Technology Collaboratory
Building the technological foundations for a plural society, where diverse communities can cooperate, self-govern, and thrive through advanced AI.
Why it matters
The Plural Technology Collaboratory is a project of the Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab. We ask an ambitious question: as foundation models reshape the world, how can free, diverse, and democratic societies flourish? We believe this deserves research at the same scale as building the models themselves.
The world is investing enormously in making AI more capable, and only a small fraction of that in the civic and institutional architecture society needs to absorb it. We work on that missing half: the sociotechnical systems that help communities keep pace with digital innovation.
Our approach was pioneered in Taiwan from 2014 to 2024 under its first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, and articulated in Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (opens in new tab), the first open-source, democratically governed book, endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (opens in new tab) and a bestseller in Japan (opens in new tab).
How we work
We move from theory to technology to real-world deployment, combining political economy, cryptography, and human-computer interaction to build systems and study their consequences with real communities.
Our areas of impact
Sociotechnical Grand Challenges
AI is advancing far faster than the institutions meant to absorb it. We work on the sociotechnical grand challenges this creates: identity and provenance, data governance, democratic innovation, and the reinvention of education, problems no single sector can solve alone. Our framing essay, “What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade (opens in new tab)“, sets out this agenda with dozens of collaborators across sectors and countries.
Communal and organizational alignment
Most AI speaks in a single, flattened voice or simply tells users what they want to hear. We are building communal and organizational alignment: AI that represents the full range of relevant perspectives and surfaces where communities agree and differ, the logic behind Community Notes and Taiwan’s vTaiwan. Our paper “Community by Design” and our Noema essay “Building a Prosocial Media Ecosystem” show how, and we are extending this work to AI interactions.
Data dignity
To sustain itself, the AI economy must reward the people who create the data it runs on. Satya Nadella called this “Data Dignity” in 2018, building on our Harvard Business Review essay with Jaron Lanier. With Raul Castro Fernandez of the University of Chicago, we now design a practical market that pays fair rates for AI training data at almost no added compute cost, set out in “How AI Companies Can Pay Fair Rates for the Content They Need (opens in new tab)“.
Civic and democratic technology
To survive the arrival of AI, democracy needs digital infrastructure that helps people deliberate, find common ground, and shape decisions. We study and support participatory civic technologies that do this: Taiwan’s vTaiwan and Join, Pol.is deliberation, Alignment Assemblies, California’s EngagedCA, Germany’s Deutschland Wie Geht’s, and, most recently, Japan’s Team Mirai, which used AI to listen to voters at scale and won seats in the national legislature. Throughout, technology widens participation rather than concentrating power.
Technology for Religious Empowerment (T4RE)
Faith communities are among the oldest institutions for helping people live by their values, yet they are often overlooked in technology design. Technology for Religious Empowerment partners with communities across many traditions to build tools that strengthen, rather than disrupt, communal and spiritual life. Our work spans a multi-faith landscape study, Good Faith Design, AI red-teaming with faith leaders, and the Faith, Family and Technology Network.
Our external collaborators
We are working closely with the following collaborators outside Microsoft, as well as a variety of internal groups:
