Issues in Science and Technology

As AI arrives at the forefront in the geopolitics of scientific research, Europe is embracing a strategy centered on “public values, accountability, and trustworthiness,” anthropologist Kyriaki Papageorgiou writes. But what does it mean to build trustworthy infrastructure for AI?

“As the rest of us doomscroll through a mix of hot takes, misinformation, and moral outrage, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what most people believe,” @jayvanbavel.bsky.social writes.

“When our community is thriving, we thrive, and when our community is suffering a challenge, we suffer as well,” DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, says. issues.org/community-co...

As the United States prepares to update its biosecurity governance, how should the risks of AI be understood? Can they be mitigated by policy—or by the technology itself? Join us for this month’s Open Editorial Meeting on October 22 at 3 PM ET. Register here: luma.com/1l8hgekd

“Today’s biosecurity approach is still grounded in a foundation laid nearly two decades ago,” writes Edward You, a former FBI special agent specializing in bioweapons and emerging technologies.

The Fall 2026 ISSUES is off to press! In it, contributors explore how AI might affect public policy in a variety of domains, including how it can uncover bad actors in biosecurity, how Canada’s proposed AI sovereign wealth fund can equitably distribute profits from this technology, and much more!

What does it look like to search for truth across ideological bubbles? “Sunshine Hills Reality Edit”—this month’s Future Tense Fiction story by @tinaconnolly.bsky.social—takes us to a remote cabin where an encyclopedia editor struggles to curate a library of “truthful” information.

Information is a shared public resource—one that must be carefully looked after. In response to Connolly’s story, writer Monika Sengul-Jones explores the human labor and sticky debates required to produce and maintain a knowledge ecosystem.

Professor of history Nikhil Menon writes that “The sharp inequalities in wealth generated by the computing revolution have less to do with technology and innovation itself than with the matrix of global politics and capitalism in which computing emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Menon continues that “Today, while Indians make up ‘an important part of the global computing labor force,’ their status is precarious, subject to swings in immigration policy in the West and mainly serving ‘the interests of corporations based in the Global North,’” echoing a colonial past.

In our Summer issue, authors Katherine Loh and Imad Aad from the Center for Digital Trust at EPFL, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, examine how “the Swiss e-ID system ignited a national debate about how [public] trust is built and how such a system should be used.”

Gwen Ottinger, a professor at Drexel University, asks, “How can scientists and research institutions contribute to social justice?” In contrast to the science in which "scientists are granted sole authority to establish and uphold norms for knowing,” Ottinger suggests “reparative science.”

As more and more data centers crop up across the country, the tradeoffs they entail are often viewed as unfavorable by local communities. The question that’s pressing now is: How can communities negotiate with Big Tech over data centers to win tangible benefits? Read: issues.org/data-centers...

What would it look to construct a house whose walls, roof, and very scaffolding were all made up of living plants? In this month’s Future Tense Fiction story, writer Osahon Ize-Iyamu brings us to a Nigerian housing development pushing the idea of green architecture to new extremes.

Research Nova Scotia CEO Stefan Leslie spent 15 years managing fisheries, working to “put research to use” and bring about real, practical improvements. “The approach we’d taken to fisheries research applies in other areas: Solving a practical problem has merit as an organizing principle.”

In December 1968, Apollo 8 became the first crewed mission to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the Moon. After the spacecraft’s fourth orbit around the Moon, astronaut Bill Anders scrambled to capture the moment. The photograph came to be known as “Earthrise.” Image credit: NASA

If “Earthrise” taught humanity to look back at Earth, expeditionary artist, curator, and analog astronaut Richelle Ellis asks how seeing Earth from above changes the way we understand life below—where the planet is not a backdrop to humanity, but the source of all life, memory, and possibility.

Benchmarks and measurements for AI oversight can be valuable, but “they also share a critical structural vulnerability that AI governance has not yet adequately absorbed,” authors Urs Gasser, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and Fabienne Marco write. Read: issues.org/ai-measureme...

“As AI systems and the organizations building them learn what evaluators look for, the AI model performs for the test, figuring out how to excel in benchmarks without necessarily becoming safer, more useful, or more reliable in real-life scenarios,” they continue.

“A century ago, the arrival of the automobile threw cities out of balance,” Lina Moe and Clinton J. Andrews from Rutgers University write. Today, urban centers are being disrupted by another new technology: urban robots. Read: issues.org/urban-robots...

In “Prompts for a Perfect Daughter,” this month’s Future Tense Fiction story, writer @aijiang.bsky.social takes this idea literally, imagining a brain implant system that allows parents to embed a sort of operating manual for living. Read here: issues.org/futuretensef...