How Scientists Can Reconnect With the Public

View academia like a member of
the public would: what a concept

A popular truism among voters is that their elected officials forget them after election day and become members of The Swamp.

Except for a few who remember their roots and stand up for their constituents, politicians usually disappoint the voters. As they enjoy cocktail parties with rich influencers and lobbyists and learn how to get along with their peers and take orders from party bosses, memories of their voters fade into the background until the next campaign. Then, like magic, they suddenly remember them, visit their community, and tout all the wonderful things they have achieved. Voters often feel that most often things stay the same no matter whom they elect.

Is Big Science similar? Have scientists lost touch with the  taxpayers who fund science year after year, expecting a higher quality of life? Apparently Joseph Weizenbaum (1925-2008) thought so. The pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) who invented the classic machine-talking psychology “person” named Eliza, had serious concerns about technology. His list of questions are applicable to scientific research in general that receives government funding.

Scientism vs Humanism

Jack Stilgoe, a technology prof from University College London, resurrects the list in an opinion piece in Science 11 Aug 2023, “We need a Weizenbaum test for AI.” Many have heard of the “Turing Test” that measures whether a machine can fool a live human. The short version of the Weizenbaum test goes, “Is it good or useful? Do we need it?” Such questions are timely with the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT and large-language-model (LLM) applications that are coming at as more rapidly than we can ask questions.

Although the debate continues about whether the Turing test is a reasonable measure of artificial intelligence, the real problem is that it asks the wrong question. AI is no longer an academic debate. It is a technological reality. For society to make good decisions about AI, we should instead look to another great late 20th-century computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum. In a paper “On the impact of the computer on society,” in Science in 1972, Weizenbaum argued that his fellow computer scientists should try to view their activities from the standpoint of a member of the public. Whereas computer scientists wonder how to get their technology to work and use “electronic wizardry” to make it safe, Weizenbaum argued that ordinary people would ask “is it good?” and “do we need these things?” As excitement builds about the possibilities of generative AI, rather than asking whether these machines are intelligent, we should instead ask whether they are useful.

The Myth of Value-Free Pure Research

Pure research is important and often leads to serendipitous discoveries that are useful. But there is simply not enough time or money to research everything. Every scientist uses some criteria to decide what to work on. In a past article, I joked about a mythical scientist deciding on his research project: to collect recordings of the sounds made by animals as he steps on their feet. Such research would hardly pass the Weizenbaum test, but there have been actual funded projects coming close to that level of asininity. Certain Congresspersons have put together annual books of wasteful government spending on science projects dumb enough to outrage the average taxpayer.

Stilgoe’s opinions are refreshingly bold in a Big Science journal that typically sees all science funding as good.

Weizenbaum went on to become one of the most critical voices in the debate about AI. As he recognized and warned, AI is too important to be left to computer scientists. We should therefore be concerned about two tendencies: scientism—the framing of public issues in scientific terms—and solutionism—defining public problems to fit imagined technological solutions. Turing’s test exacerbates both. It gives scientists a false sense of purpose and a license to ignore the concerns of others about the purposes to which such machines might be put.

Unasked Questions

In 1978, Weizenbaum put together his list of questions—commonsense questions that “are almost never asked” by advocates of AI. In this list that Stilgoe reproduced in his essay, scientists should ask the same questions of all their science projects.

• Who will benefit?
• Who will bear the costs?
• What will the technology mean for future generations?
• What will be the implications not just for economies and international security, but also for our sense of what it means to be human?
• Is the technology reversible?
• What limits should be imposed on its application?

Stilgoe works with a group formulating principles for responsible use of AI, but he recognizes that these questions go beyond that field: “what are the responsibilities of scientists, particularly those working outside companies?” he asks. Big Science (the academic deans, lobbyists and journal editors) should step up and take the Weizenbaum Test whenever making decisions about what projects on which to spend taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. After a worrisome decline in public trust of science, this can help them reconnect with the voters.

The link under “scientism” in the quote above goes to a 2012 essay by Philip Kitcher in The New Republic, “The Trouble with Scientism.” Though an evolutionist, Kitcher has some pretty harsh things to say about those who demean the arts and humanities in favor of science as the only or best source of knowledge. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor liked Kitcher’s “brilliant essay” (Evolution News). It bears reading, even if we cannot endorse everything Kitcher says. Here’s a key quote: “From the nineteenth-century ventures in mechanistic psychology to contemporary attempts to introduce evolutionary concepts into the social sciences, ‘scientism’ has been criticized for its ‘mutilation’ … of the phenomena to be explained.” In the quote below, Kitcher agrees that science is not value-free:

Many scientists and commentators on science have been led to view the sciences as a value-free zone, and it is easy to understand why. When the researcher enters the lab, many features of the social world seem to have been left behind. The day’s work goes on without the need for confronting large questions about how human lives can or should go. Research is insulated because the lab is a purpose-built place, within which the rules of operation are relatively clear and well-known. Yet on a broader view, which explores the purposes and their origins, it becomes clear that judgments of the significance of particular questions profoundly affect the work done and the environments in which it is done. Behind the complex and often strikingly successful practices of contemporary science stands a history of selecting specific aspects of the world for investigation. Bits of nature do not shout out “Examine me!” Throughout history, instead, innovative scientists have built a number of lampposts under which their successors can look. It is always worth considering whether the questions that now seem most significant demand looking elsewhere for new sources of illumination.

We are finite beings, and so our investigations have to be selective, and the broadest frameworks of today’s science reflect the selections of the past. What we discover depends on the questions taken to be significant, and the selection of those questions, as well as the decision of which factors to set aside in seeking answers to them, presupposes judgments about what is valuable. Those are not only, or mainly, scientific judgments. In their turn, new discoveries modify the landscape in which further investigations will take place, and because what we learn affects how evidence is assessed, discovery shapes the evolution of our standards of evidence. Judgments of value thus pervade the environment in which scientific work is done. If they are made, as they should be, in light of the broadest and deepest reflections on human life and its possibilities, then good science depends on contributions from the humanities and the arts. Perhaps there is even a place for philosophy.

Briefly put, natural science is “too important to be left to scientists.” Citizens through their duly elected officials must hold the reins, and the scientist in the lab should be thinking, “What would the taxpayers think of the way I spend my time?”