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The pandemic taught According to Alondra Nelson, we had to re-learn the lesson: Science and technology have a whole lot to do with the problems of society, inequality and social life.
Science was politicized in the middle of a year later pandemic and a presidential campaign, in January when Joe Biden was elected president, Nelson was appointed deputy director of science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a new position. Nelson will build a division of science and society within the OSTP with the goal of addressing issues ranging from data and democracy to STEM education. In another first, Biden turned his science advisor Eric Lander, who is also the director of OSTP cabinet.
Nelson spends his career at the crossroads of race, technology and society, writing about how Afrofuturism the world can improve and how the Black Panthers used health care as an activism, the organization developed an early interest in genetics. He is the author of several books, among others The social life of DNA, which examines the rise of the consumer genetics how his desire to know the testing industry and their lineage led blacks and Mormons to become the first users of technology.
Nelson is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. Prior to his appointment, he was writing a book on the OSTP and the Obama administration’s major scientific initiatives, which included some reports on AI and government policy.
In his first formal remarks in a new paper in January, Nelson called science a social phenomenon and said technology like technology Artificial intelligence it can reveal or reflect the dangerous social architectures that underlie scientific progress. In an interview with WIRED, Nelson said that the black community in particular is suffering from the harms of science and technology and does not accept the benefits.
In the interview, he spoke about the Biden administration’s plans for scientific lines, why the administration does not have a formal attitude to ban facial recognition, and issues related to emerging technology and society, which he believes should be addressed while the administration is in power. An edited transcript follows.
WIRED: In January you talked about “the dangerous social architecture that underlies the scientific progress we are following” and mentioned gene editing and artificial intelligence. What prompted you to mention gene editing and AI in your first public remarks in that role?
Alondra Nelson: I think genetics and what AI shares are the focus of the data. Some of the things we know about data and how data analysis works on a scale are true in large-scale genomic analysis like some kind of machine learning, and are therefore fundamental. I think what we still need to work on as a nation is questions about the origin of the data analyzed with AI tools and what variables are used in making decisions and what questions are posed by scientific and technical research. I hope this OSTP is different and distinctive is a sense of honesty about the past. Science and technology has hurt some communities, excluded communities, and stopped people from doing science and technology work.
Working in an administration that regained racial equity issues and confidence in the government on the first day means that science and technology policy work must be honest with the past, and part of restoring confidence in government — restoring confidence in science and technology for any good in the world — is truly open. is about the flaws and failures of the history of science and technology.
Unfortunately, there are many examples. Next month will be another anniversary for the Associated Press story which revealed research on Tuskegee syphilis almost 40 years ago, so we will come back to that anniversary. Then, of course, we have problems in AI, which conclude that the data used are incomplete and incomplete, inaccurate, and inferred when used in social services and especially in the criminal justice system. , have real adverse effects on black and brown communities.
Lander said at a confirmation hearing that OSTP will address discrimination caused by algorithms bias. How will this work?
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