Thread by @ESpacewalk

Deus ex Technologica via @LisaMargonelli in @ISSUESinST

"Today, our collective belief in the deus ex technologica seems tragically misguided."

issues.org/deus-ex-techno…

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST "Today, our collective belief in the deus ex technologica seems tragically misguided. And our experience with COVID-19 should make us reexamine other problems that we’ve framed as technological—climate change being a prime example. Global warming has long been portrayed as a

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST technological and financial dilemma—if only we invented enough low-carbon energy sources and had enough money to string the wires. But if we carefully pick apart our underlying assumptions, we may find lessons for future policymaking: Could more systematically incorporating the

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST human dimensions of both technology and the challenges we face speed up our efforts? In other words, could deliberately connecting our technology with our messy humanness make us better problem solvers?

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST Today, our collective belief in the deus ex technologica seems tragically misguided.

As globalized phenomena, the pandemic and climate change have similarities, explains Jeremy Farrar, leader of the United Kingdom’s Wellcome charitable foundation, during his interview in

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST this issue. Both problems force governments to balance the domestic pressures of tending only to their own citizens with international responsibilities, such as making vaccines available everywhere. To Farrar, our common global future requires that we build institutions to

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST handle such “transnational challenges.” “We’re either going to have to find ways to work together or we will fail together,” he says, “whether for pandemic or climate change, inequality, or access to energy and water.”

The need for globally oriented institutions is echoed in

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST an article by Carol Dumaine, who argues that the experience of the pandemic reveals the need to reframe national security away from hostile states and human aggressors to address global public health, including children’s and young adults’ mental health. “The pandemic can be

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST seen as a harbinger of a new security landscape. More and more often, security issues are global and environmental and cannot be adequately addressed by individual nations acting on their own.”

As the country heads into an uncertain winter, Issues editors have collected a

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST series of articles examining how human considerations around technology, as well as institutions of governance, can offer new insights for policymakers working on climate. Delving into the intricacies of energy access, climate adaptation, biodiversity, religion, and California’s

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST wildfires, our contributors show how thinking deeply about the human side of our dilemmas can inspire new policy choices, address inequities, and possibly even solve seemingly intractable problems...

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST These new, more human approaches to problem-solving are not only a recognition of the limits of technology and the benefits of social science—they’re also a realization that previous beliefs about strategies to successfully reduce emissions have not come to fruition. As David

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST Simpson writes in his reconsideration of the social cost of carbon, in the 1990s many economists held the view that human ingenuity would compensate for resource depletion and environmental degradation as it had in the past, painlessly solving the problem of carbon emissions.

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST This optimistic scenario permeated policy, but 25 years later Simpson wonders whether “the unknown and unknowable risks of climate change argue for caution.”...

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST And the linear model is not the only simplified idea we’ve inherited about innovation, argues @ShobitaP . We’ve also nurtured a belief that innovation and markets alone can—and will—heal society’s ills.

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST @ShobitaP “For generations, scientists, engineers, and policymakers have assumed that the US approach to innovation would inevitably produce equity. But it has become clear that this is not the case,” she writes.

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST @ShobitaP Parthasarathy argues that systemic change is required, as well as a reconception of innovation itself.

@LisaMargonelli @ISSUESinST @ShobitaP “For the last 75 years, the ‘endless frontiers’ of science have been defined too narrowly, by too few people, and with incorrect assumptions about the relationship between innovation and societal benefit.”"