CHICAGO — Sometime in the 18th century, the Enlightenment settled a contentious, centuries-old question: Where does knowledge come from? For millennia, many people had pointed to God. But the early modern period brought a new consensus, namely that knowledge comes from human scientists working at the edge of what is known, armed with observation, mathematics, experimentation, and logic. As the historian Steven Shapin has noted, this was a social as much as an intellectual revolution. Science started rewiring our shared value system around the idea that research and rigor are virtuous. We held ourselves and our highest institutions to the standard of scientific inquiry. No political system reflects this shift better than democracy. The ideal of popular sovereignty rests on the principle that each of us is capable of comparing candidates or policy proposals and reaching our own informed conclusion. Today, we are on the cusp of a similar revolution. In September, one of OpenAI’s models took less than a week to solve a math problem that had stumped scientists for decades; and artificial