Science, Technology, and Public Policy

As climate change and economic activity in the region accelerate in the Bering Strait region, the United States and Russia have a common interest in mitigating these shared environmental risks. A November workshop hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) brought together seventeen experts to explore potential actions that the United States and Russia could pursue, jointly or independently, to protect the Bering Strait’s sensitive marine ecosystem and coastal communities. 

The powerful effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt in business, politics, medicine, war, and almost every other domain of twenty-first century life. For all of its positive potential, the technology presents significant risks that are best addressed sooner rather than later.

In The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Tsao propose a new and holistic system, a rethinking of the nature and nurturing of research. They share lessons from their vast research experience in the physical sciences and engineering, as well as from perspectives drawn from the history and philosophy of science and technology, research policy and management, and the evolutionary biological, complexity, physical, and economic sciences.

David Keith argues that either or both carbon removal or solar geoengineering  is needed to cool the planet this century. There are no other options.

Jonathan Zittrain differentiates between application and infrastructure moderation and analyzes the history of and the arguments for and against moderation of each.

Joel Clement describes the influence of U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin over the Department of the Interior and advises that a forward-looking legislator in a fossil-fuel state would be wise to fight aggressively for financial commitments to make the people in their state part of the vanguard of the new clean energy economy, rather than set back the U.S. economy by fighting the inevitable energy transition itself.

Joel Clement details the concerns surrounding the use of solar geoengineering to mask the effects of climate change and argues for using existing technology to quickly transition away from fossil fuels.

Bruce Schneier warns that AIs are becoming hackers. They're able to find exploitable vulnerabilities in software code. They're still not very good at it, but they'll get better. It's the kind of problem that lends itself to modern machine learning techniques: an enormous amount of input data, pattern matching, and goals that permit reinforcement. We have every reason to believe that AIs will continue to get better at this task and will soon surpass humans. They'll even come up with hacks that we humans would judge creative.

In the face of advancing impacts of climate change — fires, smoke, floods, droughts, storms, and heat— Lara Hansen and Joel Clement argue for changing the way the country does business in every facet of the economy, with an eye toward reducing risk, increasing resilience, and ensuring equity and justice.

In comparing the first 100 days in office of Presidents Biden and Trump, Joel Clement writes that the comparison comes down to one question — did the president move the needle in the first 100 days?