Technopolis’ Flat-Earther Problem
Something about the current debate over artificial intelligence felt remarkably familiar: the people building the most powerful systems are also among those warning most loudly that these systems could destroy us. Technological and policy elites are often exceptionally good at seeing two dimensions of change: how fast and in which direction. What they too often flatten is the third dimension: public value.
Science: A Long Wave
One of the genuinely surprising aspects of OSTP’s new Science: A New Golden Age is its invocation of the linear model, as if American science policy has remained trapped within Bush’s institutional architecture for eighty years. The report presents itself as a fundamental rethinking of a system built around assumptions inherited from Bush. But the system has been adapting to the inadequacies of that model for half a century.
A Science Policy Outsider’s Theory of Change
Going mainstream has a cost. But staying outside has a cost too. The point is not to remain marginal forever. The point is to preserve the outsider’s discipline: the habit of asking what the mainstream cannot yet ask, the patience to move when the current opens, and the humility to know that it will take a few punts to get there from here.
