Abstract
Technologists and policymakers largely inhabit two separate worlds. It’s an old problem, one that the British scientist CP Snow identified in a 1959 essay entitled The Two Cultures. He called them sciences and humanities, and pointed to the split as a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.
Today, it’s a crisis. Technology is now deeply intertwined with policy. We’re building complex socio-technical systems at all levels of our society. Software constrains behaviour with an efficiency that no law can match. It’s all changing fast; technology is literally creating the world we all live in, and policymakers can’t keep up. Getting it wrong has become increasingly catastrophic. Surviving the future depends in bringing technologists and policymakers together.
Listen to Sir Bruce Schneier
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