Today we're talking expertise. It seems it's a self evident category, right? I'm an expert, I'm teaching you. You've got especially recently we've thought about public health experts and physicians as experts. But we've also seen lots of controversy especially I would say over the last 40, 50 years, especially when it comes to really technical questions. There has been a lot of protests in the streets whether it's super technical question about whether or not we should allow patents on human genes, what we should do about climate change. Not only is there protests in the streets but there are lots of citizens who say, we are absolutely affected by these things that these questions that seem super technical. We have something to say, we have expertise too and of course the question then is, do they have expertise? But we'll get back to that, we'll get to that in a second. So what are these kinds of protests often about? Now, you might be looking, for example at this slide and thinking well, GMOs okay, they just don't know, right? They may not know the risk issues, they may not understand the safety, they might think that there's some problem with it, but they don't really understand that's why we need scientists, right? But often what these protests are about is about things like, there's concern that people don't have access to crucial technologies, right? So you might see protests about the costs of pharmaceuticals for example or the lack of access to the Covid vaccine. You might see protests about technologies that people see as harmful like genetically modified organisms. You might see protests from people because they're concerned that they're losing control and influence over their own lives. Concerned for example, about the growth of the private domain and the limitations of the public domain, so you might think about that in the context of patents on human genes for example. More generally though, what we're definitely seeing worldwide is citizens who are seeking a greater voice in shaping, not only do they feel they don't have a voice in broad government decisions. But in particular, they want more of a voice in questions of science and technology and they're specifically frustrated at expert advice especially technical expert advice. And as I said, you might be thinking to yourself, these people, they're not experts, they're just people and they may not understand and technical experts have a lot of formal certification. They don't quite get it, but I want to complicate that a little bit, right? We think about experts, especially in the context of technology policy as being formally certified, right? There in fact the opposite of laypeople, they earn their expertise, they have lots of degrees, they worked really hard. They have also, we don't think about this but they have a particular social status. And we tend to then think that because we think of laypersons as being kind of in opposition to experts, then we think that the problem is that they're protesting because the layperson just needs more knowledge, right? They're ignorant, if only they learned from the technical experts, then they would be able to participate more actively. They would agree with the technical expert, all of the problems would be solved. But, here's the rub or at least here's the first rub. Which is that often when in these debates it's not necessarily that Publix are banging at the door, questioning whether the scientists should do one thing or another thing with a particular Petri dish or a particular cell. The questions usually arise when scientists and engineers are often engaging with the world in some way, right? We are often interested in solving problems out there in the world. And so who is an expert in the world, right? Then you have to kind of give a little bit of room for public's, right? We all in different aspects would say that we are experts in our own lives, right? So this is where the questions of expertise kind of start to rub up against one another. More broadly I want you to kind of reflect on this idea that, when we're talking about social problems, right? We need social wisdom and social wisdom can be reflected to a degree in technical expertise, but they're not the same thing, right? Technical expertise is expert perhaps in the technical dimensions, but it doesn't necessarily mean that a technical expert understands how that technology will be in society. The implications, how people will receive it, how it will be integrated, whether it's appropriate in that particular environment. All of those are the things that publics have a better understanding of usually and so we need to think about expertise differently. And I think this is particularly important when we're thinking about questions of equity. If you're thinking about questions of equity, then by definition you're thinking about the technology in society, right? And so you have to leave some room for people who understand the world a little bit differently outside of the realm of the technical experts. Laypersons in fact have a lot of that expertise. It's often not quantifiable and not formal, but they have a lot of knowledge about how technologies operate in society. What are the problems that they experience? What are their problems with previous iterations of similar technologies that they expect? For example, you think about the history of surveillance technologies and you might say, if particular populations, especially historically disadvantaged communities of color. Tend to be the subject of surveillance technologies and tend to be discriminated against when a society adopts a surveillance technology. Then you can imagine what the problems with the facial recognition technology might be for example, right? And the thing is, is that publics are often the primary users and recipients of technologies. And that's important to think about how we might include those sorts of people. When you think about what kind of expertise Publix provide, you might think about it in at least two ways. One is specialized but perhaps less not formal expertise, so you might think about farmers, right? Farmers have an understanding of the land, bee keepers have an understanding of the bee ecosystem. But you might also think about experiential expertise that is, if you have Covid then you have some real expertise about the disease but also about how the disease affects you, how it affects your family, how it affects your community. You might have particular kinds of experiences in how your community works. You might embody a particular demographic group for example. If you have a disability, you might have a particular understanding of how technologies affect people with disabilities right?So that might be classified under experiential expertise. So I want to talk a little bit through some of how that kind of differential expertise or expertise that we might not consider is incredibly relevant to questions about technology. So here's a simple example I think, Joy Buolamwini, some of you may have heard of her, she's relatively young researcher still but she had a huge impact on the field of facial recognition technology. She was at the time just a few years ago, a graduate student in computer science, with an interest in art. Then she was working with computer vision software for her graduate studies and she realized that it didn't work unless she put on a white mask and ultimately, she turned this into a research project. She published a really famous paper that showed that facial recognition software was less accurate for anyone who wasn't a middle aged white man. And it turned out that the data sets were limited and biased. Now, if Joy Buoamwini was not a person of color, a woman of color, she would have never known this, right? This whole area that has really revolutionized a big chunk of the world of artificial intelligence, we would never have known that without her intervention. And I think it's important that not only was she a woman of color, a black woman in particular, but she had specifically an interest in art and that was sort of where the idea of, it can't see me, I need to put on a mask. All of that came not just from, she had some technical expertise of course, but it came from her other identities. A second crucial case is AIDS activism. So, in the 1970s there was a real groundswell of activism. And it came from the civil rights movements in the 1960s, but then you see in the 1970s the rise of the environmental movement, the women's movement, the patient advocacy movements. And of course in the 1980s, this was a period when gay men began to get HIV and many of them were dying from the disease. And so, a number of gay men were very frustrated that for example Ronald Reagan famously did not even mention the epidemic or AIDS. That these men that were dying felt that none of the government agencies were really paying any attention. There was no attention at the Food and Drug Administration to expedite drugs for example for the condition. There was no attention in the National Institutes of Health at funding this kind of research. And so, in order to advocate for themselves, a number of these gay men had to teach themselves about the genealogy and infectious disease and the medical impacts and that allowed them to become more effective advocates. So they really combined technical expertise, with tried and true physical collective action demonstrations like the image that you see here, which is them staging a die in on Wall Street to call attention to what was going on. And they did similar kinds of public events in front of the Food and Drug Administration for example. But it was always tied to this technical expertise because they had to be able to fight on that terrain. But then they brought with that terrain, a different perspective of the patient experience and the urgency with which they were suffering. What that meant in the long run was that they came with very different ideas of risk, especially around trying new pharmaceutical treatments and also priorities. So one of the big hiccups then was that the scientists kept saying, the biomedical scientist kept saying, wait we're going through the proper processes, we're going through the randomized clinical trial. That's the gold standard, that's how we'll really know if this treatment works is if we have a treatment group and a control group and then we study them for a long time. And the AIDS activist said, we don't have time for that, scores of people are dying every day. And as a result, actually, the Food and Drug Administration came up with emergency approval processes. So that essentially it would change the risk calculation and said that in certain circumstances we need a different approach. And in fact also scientists changed the way they thought about clinical trials, both because of the pleas of AIDS activists and their understanding of the technical details. But actually being confronted with the real implications of what the gold standard approach did, right? So that's a really important demonstration of how that can really change the way you think about a seemingly technical issue. And then finally, another example is the very recent discussions and concerns about colony collapse disorders and the effects on bees, basically there's been this concern that bees are dying in huge rates. And beekeepers have been saying that this is the result of these insecticides, neonicotinoids. But there has been a pushback from technical experts saying, no, no, there isn't clear evidence and we've done all of these experiments. But it doesn't show that there's a real connection. And the beekeepers basically say, listen it doesn't show a connection maybe in your laboratory. But we are seeing this phenomenon in the field, in the complexity of the real world and that makes a difference, right? In some, the bee keepers see it as a practical problem, but the scientists see it as a research problem, right? So even though they are looking at the the same problem, it appears that they're looking at the same problem. They're actually looking at a very different problem when you're talking about it in society and what to do about this problem, right? The problem of the chemical in society, they're the beekeepers expertise means much more, right?Because they're seeing it in a different way. So, what I hope today is that I've given you some food for thought and thinking about how complicated the seemingly simple category of expertise really is.
