[Music] welcome to the weiner conference call series these one-hour on-the-record phone calls feature leading experts from harvard county school who answer your questions on public policy and current events weiner conference calls recognize malcolm weiner's role in proposing and supporting this series as well as the wiener center for social policy at harvard kennedy school [Music] good day everyone i'm ralph fernelli from the office of communications and public affairs and the host of the harvard kennedy schools policy cast podcast and i'm very pleased to welcome you to this weiner conference call which is kindly sustained by dr malcolm weiner who supports the kennedy school in this and many other ways today we're joined by professor sheila jasinov who is the founder and director of the program on science technology and society and the forzheimer professor of science and technology studies at harvard kennedy school professor jasinoff is a leading scholar at the intersection of science technology law democratic theory and public policy her work has tackled pressing global challenges including climate change the covet 19 pandemic and biotechnologies such as gene editing arguing for a democratization of science and technology that more fully includes society in the con in the conversation she's an influential writer in the field of sts having authored or co-authored 10 books and edited or co-edited eight others she's also written more than 130 articles and book chapters and in march it was announced that she has been awarded the 2022 holberg prize which is among the world's most prestigious awards for academic work in the humanities and social sciences we are very fortunate that she has agreed to share her expertise today with the kennedy school's alumni and friends sheila sheila i believe you're on mute thank you for that introduction ralph and also above all thank you for the opportunity to present to the kennedy schools friends um on this topic that is uh so dear to my heart so without um waiting further because i'd like to save as much time for q a as possible let me share my screen and go through the um the slides that i prepared for this first part of our time together um so what i've done in effect i want to go back a screen what i want to do in effect is to uh offer a little tasters choice menu because i wasn't positive um what aspect of our work to focus on and i suspect that the people keying into the call will come from a variety of different angles so i'm i continually remember a meeting that i had when i was beginning my work on law and science and i think i wrote the first book that sort of attempted to map out the relationships between law and science and it was funded by the what was then called the 20th century fund and they had a cocktail party for us at a at a political science association meeting and i met one of their other grantees and he said to me what are you writing about is there really anything to write about in the relationship between science technology and law and so today when i begin my graduate seminar i often just troll through the day's headlines in one newspaper i often pick the new york times and just pick out headlines that in a sense answered that young man's question or he was young then and so was i and just show people the enormous number and variety of ways in which our world throws up questions for public policy that relates to the intersections of science technology and society so this is literally from you know a last night's um collection of headlines in the new york times of different stories and you see everything that you might be interested in appearing there so there's the digital world there's the environmental world there's war and peace there's international relations uh there is the economy there's kovitkova there's particular people like bill gates and the very bottommost one the 200 000 facelift is a reminder that we are of course very conscious of the candidate of at the kennedy school that is equality and inequality are phenomena that have to some extent been exacerbated by the advances in science and technology and that is something that we want to think about very seriously as well so one could not in today's present not to mention thinking about the future fail to see that science and technology are terrifically important um things to understand not just grapple with not just to encourage not just to push forward like we do in the school of engineering and applied science but also for public policy to take on board and think about in very serious ways so what is my program doing about it so our we're a very small program we only have one faculty line and not and everything else is happening at the moment on soft money so you have to uh understand that point about scale as i run through the things that we're doing nevertheless small things if they're you know atomic and force can set big things going and our ambition is to be a generative but also continuing source of theory-driven research on current policy problems that are associated with scientific and technological change and there you have a series of the major grants that we're managing at the moment the sociotechnical transformations have to do with sustainability the covert is self-explanatory genome editing is the self-explanatory the summer school is one of our outreach programs that i'm happy to talk about later and trust in science is just something that has been on everybody's lips in the last couple of years and that is something where we are heading out of our program the trust and science project that is part of the harvard data science initiative hi professor i'm so sorry to interrupt you this is margaret i'm gonna share my screen because we're unable to see the slides is that okay with you that's okay i wonder why that is the case um do you want to try one more time sorry sorry about this well i think you should just go ahead and share i don't i mean i did everything that i normally do but i've been having internet problems with this interface since the beginning so i think you'd better do it okay but then i have to be able to see it as well can you see my screen yeah thank you okay yes just okay so so i was looking i was i just ran through these grants and i won't bother repeating that but just to give you an idea that whether it's the climate interface or data and trust or innovation or of course covet and and gene editing we are there with actual research that we're carrying out could we have the next slide then please this is just a visual um display of what that means in terms of the kennedy school's outreach to different things and so beginning with the top left we manage a couple of different networks at different professional levels the science and democracy network is a network of young and mid-career scholars that we sustain but we've added to that a network of graduate researchers in the field of sds these are anchored in the kennedy school and they have different kinds of meetings and activities we have connections to take move across to the top right corner with other programs around harvard so we are also an anchor for across school and cross-disciplinary activities and those are the names of some of the enterprises we're connected to we believe very much in public outreach and we have two different major programs that have been running for 15 years at least the fcs circle which is a weekly seminar series and the science and democracy lectures which are uh um sort of premier event once a semester where we bring together very high level speakers with scholars and practitioners throughout harvard and and that has proved to be a very engaging occasion for public um um in public uh involvement as well and then of course we are deeply engaged in teaching and i'll come back to that for the end of my presentation but our teaching also crosses lines it reaches out to the faculty of arts and sciences we teach in the gen ed program we teach in the engineering school and also through the graduate school by offering a minor or secondary field in sts and the point is that all of this is anchored in the kennedy school with the program leadership with the academic advising with core instruction and increasingly with website and social media so let's go on so i want to give you two examples of the ways in which we have jumped onto issues but also stayed abreast of them i mean so a point i want to make is that to deal with the present and the immediate future you often have to be embedded in a long-standing engagement with these ash issues so with regard to the life sciences and society which is one of the big frontiers of innovation our ambition is and has been to be the powerhouse of thought on science technology and society in this era of genetic genomic and post-genomic revolutions that we were seeing in society so about 20 years ago we formed something that we call the biology and society co-laboratory that thing in its turn gave way to what we have now which is much more international it's called the global observatory for genome editing and we are grappling with some of the questions of the frontiers of policy in particular should the human germline be edited and if so under what conditions but because we're a policy school we deal with the democratic side of it who participates in these decisions who decides and by what processes so if we go on to the next slide we were prepared to leap onto these issues when in december 2015 the national academies of sciences together with leading scientific organizations in china and in britain formed the first international summit and we wanted to steer the discussion away from scientific self-governance because those of us who study science technology and society do not believe that it's adequate to govern the frontiers of technology by delegating the governance power to the scientists themselves other people have to be involved as well so in april 2017 we had a meeting in which we proved what it would mean to achieve a broad societal consensus on genome editing and if we go on one result of that meeting was that we had a multi-authored set of articles but one of them was this idea of crispr democracy crispr is the name of the gene editing technology that has become you know almost a word of record so um inclusive deliberation how does one include people into deliberation on these frontiers technologies and with that if we go to the next line we have held a series of very um well-attended and high-level meetings for the last five years so the first meeting was five years ago that 2017 meeting that i already gave you the the um pointer to and we called it editorial aspirations what is it that scientists and technologists but also society at large what we aspire to when we adopt genetic editing technologies and then by a couple of years later in 2019 as you see in the middle poster people had really started wondering what the limits should be and should there be a moratorium and then in effect covett came along and put a moratorium that we hadn't expected onto a lot of things and now just at the end of this week we're having a five-year retrospective with some of the most prominent voices internationally and otherwise thinking about institutional bioethics so what i want to illustrate with this progression of slides is not just that the program makes pretty pictures but that we believe in really staying closely tied to the issues that we're studying and staying at the forefront of these debates and continually returning with other sorts of questions you know who is being excluded who is being included what kinds of issues are being framed and are they being framed well or poorly this is part of what we are continually engaged with now if we go on a second example i wanted to give was you know how it is said that you know prepared minds are the best things to have because then surprises don't hit us in the same way so when covert landed in that extremely shocking way for us at harvard on march 13th of 2020 in a sense our research community and we in the sts program at the kennedy school were prepared to start doing something about it in part this was because we have academic networks that are very significant and in this case what was tremendously significant was that i had deep collegial relationships with cornell so i know that many people believe that universities isolate themselves and do not reach out to others this is in part a story about how outreach matters so my colleague stephen hill gardner at cornell and i co-launched and let's go on a project that had initially only nine countries we were looking at but then all of our colleagues in all of these other countries jumped onto the project because they recognized that we could offer a kind of leadership and we ended up with 16 countries and two affiliates and for the last two years we've been studying in detail the development of policies related to covet 19 in all of these countries and when i speak of a network if we go to the next slide this has been a tremendous project that has brought together 16 countries two affiliates as i just mentioned 39 institutions and 59 researchers and you might be wondering what sort of budget does all this take well our budget has been in the six figures and in the modest six figures because it's the human connections that have counted but several of our colleagues for example those in japan and those in france and in the uk have been able to raise their own parallel funding and much of it has actually been happening on volunteer time but people are just deeply interested in pursuing their research together because they see that the collective is more important than the individual pieces and you know that has been so uplifting to me in this time of isolation that i can't even begin to tell you how much it has meant let's go on so i want to discuss a little bit about the findings of this project because obviously it's not just nice to have conversations with one's colleagues but is one discovering things so one thing we have discovered is that it would be a problem to just look at how the health system has responded to the pandemic that we have to look concurrently at the economic system and the political system and our project has made some theoretical advances that i think are quite important by looking at these three systems operating together let's go on so one of the first things we discovered was that there are patterned responses and they relate to the ways in which these three systems can be synchronized or not synchronized and we identified these three broad patterns which people found very intriguing we found that some countries with so-called control countries these days i'm sure you've been reading about china's xerocovid policy and why it seems to be breaking down and perhaps not working so well but we found that there was a cluster of countries not only in east asia because australia also belongs to this group and not only authoritarian in the chinese sense but also in the democratic sense of taiwan and sort of guided democracy like in singapore and democracy like in south korea that these countries had tried to keep the virus up that was the focus of their control policies and they formed one package and for each of these columns we identified different ways in which they had approached the health issue the economy issue and the politics issue and as i say these were all intertwined then there was a consensus country where the epitome is perhaps germany where the virus could not be kept out the virus was prevalent but the political system and policy system as a whole came to concession consensus around the key findings and the key policy recommendations especially in the first year of the coronavirus and we have we can talk a little bit more about this if you're interested and then there were the chaotic countries where the center of governance was unclear and whether you looked at the economy or the politics or the health there was no sense of a society marching together so in the second year of the crisis we've been asking explanatory questions and we've also been deepening and enlarging our uh research base in uh various ways that that i'd be happy to talk about but mindful of the time we have let's go on so a question right now in 2022 is where does this research reach and what is the sds program looking at in terms of where we believe breakthroughs are to be made in research that relates to public policy so one big cluster is around our ideas of democracy and particularly as linked up with digitization the rapid flow of information the sharing of information on social media and one very particular focus that we have is a set of research that we're channeling for the harvard data science initiative and um again i'd be happy to talk in detail about it but the trust and science project is a thus far privately sponsored program through which we're trying to build a network of inner harvard resources so we're trying to break down research silos within harvard using our knowledge and our capacities for networking in the kennedy school to create more bang for buck by putting major researchers together studying different dimensions of the trust and science problem we're also deeply involved in studying sustainability and we have an ongoing comparative research project involving five countries uk germany kenya india and the us and we're looking particularly at energy transformations and what makes them sustainable in a similarly related way but a bit more futuristic we're looking at climate governance and how geoengineering factors into a world where institutions are not exactly marching and not step and yet this is a planetary scale technology that is geared toward addressing some of the most pressing problems of climate change and last but not least a project that is extremely dear to my heart is this global observatory and genome editing that i've already mentioned and what we're exploring they're trying to prove there is is there scope for cosmopolitan bioethics and by that we mean that people do not have to buy into exactly the same notions of what life is or what we owe to it because we will not get a hundred percent agreement around the world but can we find the principles on which we can coexist with people who are doing different who have different belief systems and you know given the debate that i'm sure you are all aware of around roe v wade you will notice that cosmopolitanism is not just an idea of the international discussion but even within our own society how do we find the ways to coexist with moralities that are profoundly different around the question of life and the image there is just to show you that our program small as it is draws strength from relationships that we have built across the kennedy school and across the university so this is a program that we hosted just a few days ago on may 4th and it was titled a right to truth with a question mark can we posit something like this as part of human rights that would give us a basis for regulating things like the spread of misinformation but we collaborated there with the car center for human rights at the kennedy school and also with the oxford internet institute so it's an example of how we believe that you know small things turned into collaborative projects can achieve uh bang for the buck more than we actually have in the way of resources so let me conclude with a few more things about the program and then open it up so let's go on so this is just a list of some of the kinds of institutions that come to the sts program at harvard for advice for lectures for input of different sorts and you know these are just some of the things that some of the entities that we have recently advised or spoken to or given um some of our time to and you will see that they are very international um some of them come to us for things about ethics some of them come for things about risk uh like the french agency for food environmental occupational health and safety is very interested in risk management like the european food safety authority the national academies have come to us on biosecurity issues and on security issues more broadly the thailand institute of justice wants us to talk to them about technology and law anyway so you see a huge variety of clients for our work throughout the throughout the world really and then going on i deeply believe in teaching as the center of our mission and this diagram shows you how we have been building across time and the secondary field is a minor that we anchor in the kennedy school but is available to phd students throughout harvard and there with the colors you see the different schools that are sending students in effect to the kennedy school to learn about science technology and society you see a little bit of covet impact there but it is in my view very much a growth industry and it's a demonstration of how a minor field can really energize people that are scattered throughout harvard and you know our presidents larry bakker now they like to speak about one harvard but this is something that articulates that belief and shows you how we are tackling it and then similarly the courses that we offer with their different enrollments also show a similar kind of outreach across the university and there's a huge richness from these students sitting together in the same room different ages different professional backgrounds talking to one another so i hope you'll see that side as a little bit of you know a kind of vision of pedagogy also you know accompanying the research the training the policy advice and the public outreach and um if we move on um there are websites i'd be happy to share these but these are some of the places where more information can be found and then continuing with that i'd like to thank you for your attention and um return to full screen mode and take your questions well thank you very much sheila all right now we're going to open the session up for your questions so to ask a question please use the virtual hand raising feature of zoom and in true kennedy school fashion we're going to ask you to do two things one keep your question brief and two please make sure that it ends in a question mark you'll be notified by june via zoom's chat feature when it's your turn to speak and when it is please make sure that you unmute yourself when you hear from the staff finally i think all our participants would appreciate it if you could state your kennedy school affiliation before you ask your question we're going to get things started by asking a question that was submitted earlier by sarah spencer who's an mpp 2006 and that question is sheila how will the race for technological dominance affect global stability and how might the quest for strategic advantage in science and technology particularly thinking about the us the uk and the eu impact the existing architecture around the constraints on state power and the systems for interstate dialogue and security cooperation so if i could really answer that question then i would deserve some kind of place on mount olympus or some place where i could enjoy iraqi status um i think that the framing of these of a question that way is challenging but also perhaps too broad i mean so technological dominance what does it mean i mean does it mean control of the rare earths that we need in order to make computers does it mean having the kinds of populations who will not rebel against technology does it mean the kind of ongoing investment like in mrna research that resulted in one of the most rapid breakthroughs in vaccine technology that we have ever witnessed and and what are these technologies for anyway i mean so i think in the mind of people who worry about technological dominance is a very important concern and it is the concern for national security as it has been defined you know to some extent in the pentagon's terms i myself think that a that a society to be secure has to look at the bottom end of the scale as well how good is its governance structure how flexible and adaptive and resilient is it as a society so i think that the worries to me about technological dominance need to be themselves picked apart in terms of sub fields and units and there i think that you know maybe if america were true to itself the worries would be less than if we just think well who's going to get ahead in the cyber security game i mean as i say these are not i mean it's an entwined braided world that we live in and no strand is independent of the others you don't have a braid without all the pieces being continually woven together but i think that thinking of it as a race where people are ahead and behind and the lanes are clearly marked to me understates the problem and may you know you can only run a horse race with blinders on right i mean you know so i think that that is a big problem and we need to have these cross-cutting conversations that may not be a satisfying answer and i myself am involved in some of these lanes as well because i see the importance but i see my role inside of any of these lanes as being to some degree a reminder look to the right look to the left look behind where you came from and then look ahead but as i say that that is not a sufficiently targeted strategically pointed answer i will say that people who think of solutions without looking right left and behind often come up with the wrong solutions okay i think our next participant is ready to ask their question please identify yourself state your affiliation with the kennedy school and ask away thank you ralph uh hi professor yazonov my name is pedro krishna and i'm the head of navi the brazilian green deal together with the labour party and the institute the institute of former president luis inaustra and uh one of the key things like listening to you speaking that we worry about navi in brazil and also in the consortium working together with south africa and india is the fact that we have two levels in the challenge of technological inclusion we have the national levels between the rich and the poor as you well stated but we also have this international dispute of technological inequality with a huge risk for countries like mine and the whole majority world latin america africa and asia of uh technological new colonialism uh we have seen for instance that even for global problems that are interconnected like the pandemic not breaking the patents of the vaccines that by the way were developed in the r d with public money is a major issue that we still have to face so i would like to ask you how do you see the best pathway for a more inclusive and uh technological development within our societies but also in the global stage between the countries in the majority world and the rich countries like the u.s in the european union and in northeast asia thank you and that again is one of these million dollar questions and does not have a simple answer because i think these the there is no single best way very smart minds work on these things and if there were a best way they would have found it by the time the best way is found things have often moved on and there's a new problem on the horizon but i think that we if we look at particular institutions and particular structuring elements in the system of innovation for instance there are places that we can point to that have deep problems in them so we have a world health organization but we have already seen that if the u.s pulls out of it that organization would essentially be left without any teeth at all because the funding has come disproportionately from one country and if that country chooses to pull out then you know that entire structure of global data management equalization to some extent that is suddenly pulled apart one thing that we i mean so we have to go to particular international institutions and revisit them if we're really serious about global governance we have to get serious about things like the funding and not leave them vulnerable into these kinds of sudden opt-in opt-out decisions that respond to national politics and not to global need we have seen emerge in africa a positive development of a regional sort and you mentioned this international connection as well so i think that part of the um place of imagination is not to think of the world only in rich north poor south terms i mean of course that's no longer true anyway and brazil is one of the big leaders and demonstrating that that is not the case but if you think about what unites for instance the bric countries today it's also forms of governance that have not been particularly hospitable to to innovation i mean so india which i know a great deal about is having enormous amounts of problems with universities and free speech and and these kinds of uh questions but it's also inquiry right i mean scientific and technological inquiry are known to thrive in places where it's not a popularity contest with the leadership and there are historical examples where this has not worked very well so i think we have to look at these regional coalitions and see what kinds of values they're pressing forward and in science and technology and one last thing i'll say that's not often talked about but intellectual property regimes really need to be looked at as well because they so much constrain the flow of information i mean in theory we all buy into this idea that information is free-flowing and we have a free market of ideas and so forth but in practice people are continually i mean even within this country we have not fully resolved the patent disputes over crispr technology between the east coast and the west coast i mean so you know it's not it's not just an international problem it's it's a problem that that goes deeper so you know again um it's too bad that my answer to many questions is pull apart the question into its component parts or constituent parts and you'll find that we need to tackle several systems concurrently but unfortunately that is the case in our multi-systemic you know poly um polycentric world and and i think an awareness of that is uh kind of essential okay great well we have a question uh that was submitted in the chat which i will read and that question is from jonathan weiner of duke university could you say more about your work on geoengineering governance and democratization what issues or options are you exploring thanks and he has a parenthetical note we have recently published a paper on solar radiation modification and risk risk analysis um well jonathan welcome and thank you for being in the audience and i'm happy to see that your risk risk uh interests which go i think even further back than your affiliation with the kennedy school are still propelling you um to this day so you know the the governance challenges that um we're exploring to some extent relate to the ways in which questions have been framed and what structures are there or are not there so one of the things that concerns me particularly as an sts scholar is the kind of boundary drawing by which certain things are taken out of discussion out of democratic discussion one of these is a kind of false segmentation between what is pure research and what is applied research i happen to think that everything related to geoengineering falls if anywhere on the applied side of the boundary but i also think that that boundary doesn't make intellectual sense and most people these days are undertaking research because they think it will lead to some kind of betterment for humanity down the line but if we're thinking about this goes back to the rich country poor country point if we're talking about research that is very advanced in some parts of the world but will have their impact largely in other parts of the world what does accountability look like now you are an environmentalist but you are also a lawyer and i think you are very versed in the challenges of international law and the absences of international institutions so i think very specifically one of the things we're looking at is how do accountability systems get created when the power to frame questions and to develop technological responses to questions as framed when that power is very unequally lodged i'm not simply through lack of time and resources i'm not the person who creates the institutional spaces that are experimental i mean you have to turn to a john dryzek in the case of genome editing or perhaps a martin hire for for sustainable technologies and australia and um the netherlands respectively but we at the kennedy school at some extent supplying the ideas that those colleagues who are more into the hands-on implementation side of things are put into use in in various ways so i hope that's the beginning of an answer great well we have some pre-submitted questions from uh members of the audience who had registered for this call and i'd like to turn to one of those now it's a little bit long so you're gonna have to bear with me but i actually quite like it in my lifetime and this is the the participant's voice not mine in my lifetime the digital revolution brought forth technologies that few in our generation either anticipated or desired far from granting us greater leisure devices and platforms and interconnectivity have complicated our lives in the name of convenience to the point where a few if anybody understands how they function alone or together i doubt we can escape the matrix with or without pills given our near total dependency on the digital domain does this signify a usurpation of human agent of human agency by this occult ai ridden all-embracing substrate what hope do you hold out for human agency and civil society in a technocratic multiverse in which our technocratic capitalist society no one assumes accountability or will be held responsible for events and decisions that rule our fates why that is a pessimistic take on the world but it is the take that is something that i take extremely seriously so my work has been in a kind of social science that is um not the dominant one in the kennedy school so in the kennedy school the the science of economics is the one that is most represented and in general around harvard what we call the interpretive social sciences are not that well represented so just a very quickie definition the interpreter of social sciences are the ones that look at how we attach meaning to things whereas the sort of positive social sciences are the ones that try to create data and draw from the ways in which people behave regularities and laws and then cluster solutions around those laws now it turns out that the positive social sciences are continually bumping up against the fact that they modeled society wrong because they misunderstood the actual drivers motivations where people are coming from the most famous example may be francis fukuyama's end of history idea in 1990 when he thought that now that the two big political systems capitalists and communists had dissolved in favor of capitalism there would not be struggle so i think at the very least we would have to say that judgment was premature so interpretive social sciences try to take the question of what we believe and how we respond to things and their agency which was at the core of this question becomes deeply significant who has agency who feels they can and who has the resources with which to change the world as a humanist by confession i worry very much about that question and the sort of story that was embedded in the question that these technologies are out of control and nobody can understand them i think was part of the question and they're just you know this huge train that we have set in motion and there's no way to stop it you know partly we have to remember that this all happened in a very short span of time it's a little bit like ozone depletion that also happened in a very short span of time everybody thought that chlorofluorocarbon were really incredibly safe stable they did not seem to be toxic and then guess what it turned out that they were not toxic to us as far as we know but they certainly were toxic to the ozone layer and suddenly the ozone layer began to be depleted and it took us a while to figure this out and see it but when i was saying before that i think you have to look to the right and left and not just straight down the alley that you're on this was a big reminder and i think similarly with the internet we've had this sort of sudden burst of concealed toxicity that we should have been actually smart enough to foresee and we didn't so what is the answer now well first of all people have to be got to agree on what is toxic and not continually carry on in fundamentalist i am the first amendment person and i believe in full speech and therefore i will acquire a social media platform as the sole owner of it and have whoever wants to speak in it speak in whatever ways right um you know what does that actually do to human agency what does it do to human agency if some people have the capacity to reach you know 83 million people in one day and the rest of us have no followers or 123 followers i mean you know it's this power is not equally distributed so i think we have to take the question of the human seriously where is it that our technologies are depriving us of the capacity to act as humans this is not a new question this is something that the industrial revolution forced upon philosophers of technology and subsequently sts scholars like myself and people have been thinking about it for a very long time i think we should be thinking about it more centrally inside of the kennedy school i think that there should be a much more integrated approach to thinking about policy itself as a technology and whether it is empowering people or disempowering people do we have alternatives in various places of technological solutions that may be fast but disempowering or slow but empowering how would we even measure those things how would we describe them so these are some of the questions that that i think are at the heart of what sometimes seems to be a losing battle i mean i will tell you the humanities and the humanistic social sciences are not the places where money is flowing to these are not the things that people build buildings for they're not the places where they give you know half billion dollar research grants they give that to studies of artificial intelligence i personally think that non-artificial intelligence needs a lot more attention before we decide to go whole hog for the artificial kind well sheila i'm glad you brought up the dominance of economics in our discourse because i have a question of my own i recently recorded an episode of policy cast with your hks colleague danny rodrick who is of course an economist but also one who is a very critical at times of his own discipline and one of the things we talked about was reconnecting reconnecting economics to democracy and i've always been fascinated about the place that democracy holds in sts studies and i'm interested in your thoughts on the ongoing threats to democratic governance both here in the united states and abroad and how they're affecting our ability to have you know an informed society that's appropriate skeptical of science and technology and a scientific community that's responsive to skepticism and human considerations um right well i can say that first of all that question is at the heart of every one of the research projects that i've described that the sds program is undertaking but you know it's it goes pretty deep i mean one of the things that i have argued is that today we don't really have a full-blown theory of democracy unless we look at the ways and this goes back to the previous question as well how to what extent and in what ways have we actually delegated power to the technological systems without even hardly recognizing it so you know ever since the europeans adopted their gdpr their regulation on data protection there's much more of the time that you visit a new site and something pops up saying you know something about privacy settings but in those privacy settings the presumption is that you will have your you will give up your information unless you restrict it okay so one of the things that we do in the kennedy school and people who are associated with us have developed like cass sunstein and the law school is nudge theory in which one major conclusion that has emerged is that whether you opt into a system or opt out of the system is deeply consequential so tell me why we have to opt out of the system in which all our information is available why don't we rather have to opt into a system where we can selectively decide which information we choose to give up or not i don't think it's possible to have agency and without agency no democracy if our minds are made transparent the constitution and the bill of rights were geared toward protecting something that in my language are called interiority the idea that there is an interior the chief justice even decided that cell phones are part of that interiority when he said when he wrote the opinion saying that cell phones may not be searched without a search warrant i think he acknowledged something quite deep there that what is being protected is not the cell phone it's the connection of the cell phone to our minds in such a way that we've made it the repository of a bunch of different things so to get democracy back and you know away from this kind of runaway sense i think we have to rediscover the tools and use them intelligently and passionately to ask questions about why policy looks a certain way and not a different way now my economist friends often say to me that they don't frame the questions that they are tool makers you come to them with a question any question they will tell you the efficient way sometimes the fair way of allocating resources so that you can get answers so i guess what i say is that my kind of science says i'm not content with the questions as framed give me a question and i'll restate it for you and then maybe we'll go to the economists and build the bridges thank you well i think we have time for just about one more question and and this one comes from uh juan santa cruz he is in our audience and he is an alum of the mpa program and his question is a few years ago you wrote an article called technologies of humilities highlighting the idea of bringing everyone's view especially the less advantaged to a particular to a particular decision that requires time and a technology for conversation like what we have now in any congress nonetheless traditional institutions for conversation in liberal democracy seems outdated in light of the immediacy of today's world do you do you think we need a new way of organizing liberal democracies [Music] one for those of you who may not know is one of those rare people who decided that he would take his kennedy school education but converted into the work of liberal democracies in a sense by engaging in active politics in chile and and um it is a challenging yet friendly question um so one you are speaking from a country in which the answer to that question has been emphatically yes i mean you had one of the most vibrant civil demonstrations uh you know month after month to say that we need to reconst chileans need to reconstitute their particular democracy and you've also had a new constitution and you've also had an election so i don't think in the us we're a bit complacent we think that our constitution was perfected at the moment that it was written and i think that to some degree an answer to your question is that we have to take the liberal democracies of the world where they are at diagnose the particular pathologies and not try to come up with a one-size-fits-all answer to liberal democracy there are different flavors of liberal democracy and ours does well at certain kinds of things and not so well at certain other kinds of things and we have to get serious about that one thing we haven't done very well at is distribution this is why many people feel left out of what in gdp terms looks great right i mean and many economists will agree but then the hard question is well why didn't our laws of economics take on board the distributive question so in my article technologies of humility one of the things i say is that we often get really hung up on prediction but when we're looking at prediction we're not looking at winners and loses necessarily we don't say in the aggregate supposing this moves forward in this way who will be the winners and who will be the losers and what will the losers say and how do we bring them into the equation so that may be a slow process but if you don't even begin to ask who the winners and losers will be when you innovate policy then there is a serious problem and i will say that a book a science fiction book that is praised by a lot of people including former president obama ministry for the future by ken stanley robinson to me was provocative in a way because it begins with a scenario that touches me very closely it begins with a scenario in which there is impossible heat in india which is happening right this moment as we speak parts of india are scorching and in this kim stanley robinson book 20 million people die in india of a heat wave and people are like boiled fish in a swimming pool where they go to escape and it's a horrifying scenario but by aggregating by turning all those people dying in india into a population of 20 million i think you to some extent undercut a responsibility issue and i think for me technologies of humility means something that people like juan as politicians understand that you have to have the empathy to put yourself in the position of the things that you're analyzing and what my job is as somebody who is blessed with the power of language and a certain amount of skill in articulation as well as a mathematicians and a lawyer's analytic cost of mind is to keep reminding is to keep reminding people we are humans we are connected to other humans we owe things to our future generations and to each other on the planet and my contributions for as much time as i have left will be towards you know finding any opportunity to make that sort of set of questions about responsibility and what we owe to one another come to the forefront in vivid ways well the time has flown by but the clock says we need to wrap it up we apologize to anybody whose question we did not get to but thank you to all of you who called in to listen to this last wiener conference call of the spring semester and of course a very special thank you to professor jason off for this fascinating conversation we look forward to having you all back on the line with us for more wiener conference calls in the next academic year have a great day everyone thank you again ralph for inviting me and thanks to everybody for being there and for your questions
2022-05-23