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Three shifts for improving the governance of emerging technologies
By Basil Mahfouz, on 11 June 2022
Without a coordinated global response, emerging technologies could quickly transform our world into a dystopia. By 2050, the lack of climate action may push mankind towards experimenting with planetary systems via geoengineering, lethal autonomous weapon systems could be deciding who lives and who doesn’t, while neuro-technologies will challenge the definition of what it means to be human.
To understand how to manage the societal impact of these technologies, on 16 May 2022, I joined 29 other specialists representing 21 countries at the Science Diplomacy Week Immersion Programme, a forum co-organised by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.
The discussions highlighted that effectively governing frontier technologies requires three fundamental shifts across international science diplomacy: (1) adopting a proactive approach towards solving challenges, (2) leveraging cutting-edge computational tools, and (3) systemically scaling access to scientific knowledge.
The wicked fuel subsidies and the complexity of their reforms: Lessons from Indonesia
By Muhamad Rosyid Jazuli, on 15 March 2022
Climate change has been a hot issue for most countries for several decades. Experts have expressed significant concern about the overconsumption of fuels across the globe. Its main driver: fuel subsidies.
Our latest publication (Jazuli, Steenmans, and Mulugetta 2021) highlights the importance of reducing global fuel subsidies. Nevertheless, studies are incredulous how these subventions persist. Our review shows that subsidy reforms are not just a matter of cuts to these subventions and the subsequent fuel price increase. It is more complex than that.
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas
Globally, in 2014, fuel consumption subsidies from various countries accounted for 13% of global GHG emissions (IEA, 2015). Fuel subsidies also often lead to carbon lock-in where development cannot be separated from fuel even though renewable energy potential is abundant (Seto et al., 2016).
Fuel subsidies can reduce logistics and transportation costs to suppress prices. However, these policies often come with a variety of ramifications. In addition to exacerbating global warming, fuel subsidies are hampering investment in fundamental sectors such as education, health, and renewable energy. In addition, these subsidies spoil the rich rather than help the poor. In Indonesia, for example, more than 80% of these subsidies are enjoyed by the richest 50% (Diop, 2014).
First RespondXR: Digital vulnerability of immersive training for first responders
By Niamh F Healy, on 16 February 2022
For the past few months, I have had the pleasure of working as a research assistant on the First Respond XR project. The pilot study, led by Dr Leonie Tanczer, Lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at UCL STEaPP, has been funded by the SPRITE Hub and explores the digital vulnerabilities associated with using Extended Reality (XR) to train police officers in the UK.
XR is an umbrella term used in reference to different types of virtual reality technology: immersive, three-dimensional, computer-generated environments. Popular examples of XR include Oculus Rift, a fully-immersive VR gaming headset, or Pokémon Go, which superimposes Pokémon onto the user’s environment via their smartphone cameras, an example of augmented reality (AR).
As the application areas of this technology are manifold, our four-month-long pilot study (December 2021 – March 2022) has the ambition to map the social, ethical, technical, and legal risks associated with the use of XR technology in the police training context. Our team (Dr Leonie Tanczer, Professor David McIlhatton, Professor Jill Marshall, Dr Mark McGill, Dr Lena Podoletz, Marina Heilbrunn and Niamh Healy) is set together with human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, legal experts, security academics, and criminology and policing specialists. The multidisciplinary nature of the team, encompassing social, legal and technical expertise, benefits the examination of this timely issue and aids a holistic analysis of XR systems in the policing context. To date, we have been conducting a literature review to identify existing use cases of XR for police training as well as applications in other first responders domains (i.e., health, military, fire service). Our legal team has also begun mapping the complex legal context surrounding police use of XR for training purposes.
In this blog, I share some of our social team’s initial findings, set out our next research steps, and explain how interested parties could get involved in our study.
Moving on from Haldane: what are the challenges to steering STI for social and economic goals?
By joanna.chataway, on 10 February 2022
If anyone wants an overview of current S&T policy in the UK at the moment, you could do a lot worse than listening in to a recent discussion hosted by the Foundation of Science and Technology. Panellists were Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Government Scientific Advisor and National Technology Adviser, Dame Ottoline Leyser, Chief Executive of UKRI, Naomi Weir, Programme Director, Innovation at the Confederation of British Industry and Professor James Wlisdon, Director of Research on Research, University of Sheffield. A fantastic lineup and a conversation that touched on many complexities of science, technology and innovation policy. The importance of engineering policy was mentioned as part of the overall picture but much less was said about this, which is a pity[1].
Photo by Julia Koblitz on Unsplash
PhD Episode II: The Return of Ethnographic Methods
By laurent.liote.19, on 16 December 2021
Hi there, it’s been a while! I guess I’ve made some progress since the last time I wrote a post like this one. Rest assured the aim of my PhD has not changed, I’m still focused on understanding how engineering advice and related modelling insights are deployed in energy policy practice (the origin story can be found here). This post is about the initial work I’ve done to answer this question and where I’m going next.
In a UK government department not so far away…
So, what have I been up to in the last year then? Well, I did an initial case study with an engineering advice team within the UK government that provides advice on energy policy questions to the rest of their department. I interviewed engineers and policy advisors working together to gain insight into ‘the engineering-policy interface’ (a fancy way of saying ‘how engineers and policy advisors interact’). I turned the themes that emerged from the interviews into academic database search terms which returned four different strands of literature: science advice, engineering and philosophy, expertise in policy and models as boundary objects. I carried out a review of these fields and compared the literature’s conclusions against my findings, I call that ‘PhD Episode I’.
And what did I make of Episode I then? Like a first episode in what I hope to be a trilogy, it was interesting, set up the characters and storyline nicely but left quite a few questions unanswered. From what I saw, most of the engineering advice consisted of explaining a technology in layman’s terms to policy analysts, answering a question by providing a summary/diagram or designing/running a model. But that’s just scratching the surface and several findings warrant further investigation, constituting the basis for my second case study: Episode II.