Advances in gene editing technologies for human, plant, and animal applications have led to calls from bench and social scientists, as well as a wide variety of societal stakeholders, for broad public engagement in the decision-making about these new technologies. Unfortunately, there is limited understanding among the groups calling for public engagement on CRISPR and other emerging technologies about 1) the goals of this engagement, 2) the modes of engagement and what we know from systematic social scientific evaluations about their effectiveness, and 3) how to connect the products of these engagement exercises to societal decision or policy making. Addressing all three areas, we systematize common goals, principles, and modalities of public engagement. We evaluate empirically the likely successes of various modalities. Finally, we outline three pathways forward that deserve close attention from the scientific community as we navigate the world of Life 2.0.
Disrupt, Ally, Resist, Embrace (DARE): Action Items for Computational Social Scientists in a Changing World
In the past decade, a number of sophisticated AI-powered systems and tools have been developed and released to the scientific community and the public. These technical developments have occurred against a backdrop of political and social upheaval that is both magnifying and magnified by public health and macroeconomic crises. These technical and socio-political changes offer multiple lenses to contextualize (or distort) scientific reflexivity. Further, to computational social scientists who study computer-mediated human behavior, they have implications on what we study and how we study it. How should the ICWSM community engage with this changing world? Which disruptions should we embrace, and which ones should we resist? Whom do we ally with, and for what purpose? In this workshop co-located with ICWSM, we invited experience-based perspectives on these questions with the intent of drafting a collective research agenda for the computational social science community. We did so via the facilitation of collaborative position papers and the discussion of imminent challenges we face in the context of, for example, proprietary large language models, an increasingly unwieldy peer review process, and growing issues in data collection and access. This document presents a summary of the contributions and discussions in the workshop.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145051
- PAR ID:
- 10433213
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICWSM Workshop Proceedings
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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