AI for social good

Faranak Hardcastle, Sujatha Raman, Jenna Imad Harb, Jenny Davis, Ehsan Nabavi

• Despite benevolent rhetoric, many AI for Social Good (AI4SG) projects deliver outcomes at odds with their stated aims –  narrowing down remedies to technical fixes by prioritising social issues in local context, abstracting them from their historical and social context and articulating them as technical tasks. 
• In social policy, this can lead to decision outsourcing, budget reallocation, decontextualised governance, vendor lock-in, and infrastructural dependency. These shifts weaken public-sector capacity to define, negotiate, and enact situated notions of the public good. 
• We propose a conceptual reframing as a first step: from AI4SG to AI in the service of the public good – re-centring social-policy expertise, local knowledge, and lived experience can enhance capacities for institutional accountability, and sustaining context-specific understandings of the public good. 

Synthetic biology, industrial biomanufacturing and emerging bioeconomies

Dan Santos

• Emerging biotechnologies, such as synthetic biology and precision fermentation, are enabling novel ways of producing critical resources (e.g. food, energy and pharmaceuticals).
• These new biotechnological approaches to innovation and manufacturing are contributing to what has been called the ‘bioeconomy’, and countries around the world are investing in research and infrastructure to support the growth of these economies
• Opening up how we imagine and value the ‘bioeconomy’ is critical so that we can have ongoing conversations about what sorts of bioeconomies we want, and how they may best serve and contribute to the broader public good.

Ethics of using AI for Science Communication

Fabien Medvecky

• What are the ethical implications of using AI in science communication? Concerns extend to more than simply hallucination, misinformation or taking jobs away from creatives and comms
• AI is a whole system, from data centres to power supply, all of which needs to be taken into account
• Beware the saviour or disaster narrative around AI — science communication also has a role in being a fair communicator about AI and its issues and benefits.