Science, Technology, and Public Policy

An excerpt from an interview with Fran Ulmer, Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative, explains what we might expect from the transition to Norwegian leadership, as well as possible paths forward for the Arctic Council and Arctic governance more broadly. The interview was conducted by Belfer Center Communications and Outreach Specialist Elizabeth Hanlon. 

In a keynote speech delivered during the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2023, Bruce Schneier argues that we need to recreate our system of governance for an era in which transformative technologies pose catastrophic risks as well as great promise.

This fall, the Belfer Center’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) brought back the popular AI Cyber Lunch seminar series to explore issues at the forefront of technology and, increasingly, public policy. The hybrid seminar series, organized by Cyber Project Fellow and HKS Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy Bruce Schneier and STPP Fellow Cathy O’Neil, brought a wide range of speakers to Harvard Kennedy School to discuss how new and emerging technologies can be harnessed to enhance, rather than harm, society.

In October, members of the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative joined more than 2,000 Arctic policymakers, scholars, business leaders, and residents in Reykjavík, Iceland, for the Arctic Circle Assembly—the world’s largest annual gathering on Arctic issues. The Arctic Initiative delegation of students presented innovative ideas for Arctic resilience. 

On October 3, 2022, John Holdren delivered the third annual Lecture on Engineering and Society at the Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C.

Professor John P. Holdren made these remarks at the US-UK Scientific Forum on "Bringing Nature into Decision Making," a joint convening organized by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, in London, UK, on June 17, 2022.

Several members of the Belfer Center community were honored recently with awards for major contributions and appointments to prestigious advisory groups. They include John P. Holdren, Sheila Jasanoff, Laura Diaz-Anadon, Francesca Giovannini, Aditi Verma, and Syra Madad.

In late March, 19 students from Harvard and the greater Boston area boarded a bus to Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, for the final session of the second annual Arctic Data Stories Workshop. 

On May 1, 2022, John Holdren accepted the NAS Public Welfare Medal and delivered an address on the topic of "Speaking Science to Power" at the Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. 

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.