Concept

Decisions and actions of all kinds by humans and AI ultimately reduce to knowledge in use. The safety and effectiveness of actions, in particular, therefore depends upon the quality of knowledge used to inform and guide them. And while the use of knowledge occurs at the level of action or business processing, the production of knowledge as a precursor to action takes place in a separate process called knowledge processing.

Not all knowledge processes, however, are alike, much less effective in terms of the truth, legitimacy, or reliability of the information they produce. Indeed, two AI systems endowed with different epistemologies can very well produce different answers to the same questions, some of which may even be contradictory. Choosing the best framework for use at the level of knowledge processing therefore matters greatly.

A third level of interest is the knowledge management level, the level at which management strategies and interventions aimed at improving knowledge processing (such as the Susty Code) are made. This is the 'applied epistemology' level. Put differently, knowledge management is knowledge process management!

The Susty Code, then, is a blueprint for high-performance, self-regulated knowledge processing, conceived at the level of knowledge management, and with the quality of action or business processing in mind. The epistemology it relies on is a variant of Critical Rationalism and takes the form of a set of rigorous epistemic rules for knowledge production. No other approach to knowledge processing in AI does this, and yet it must be done if AI is to be safe, effective, and reliable in the long run.

3-Tier Model Image 3 Shaded

The 3-Tier Model of Knowledge and Business Processing
[Source: Firestone and McElroy 2003-2026]