Technical Experts
7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks
Technical Experts investigate, on behalf of the general public and democratic decision-makers, the extraordinarily complex challenges facing modern society. These are the people who help us identify things that are going (or could go) wrong -- things like climate change, inflationary pressures, or infectious diseases that can be very hard for the general public to see. They help develop sophisticated and often very high-tech solutions to these problems. Their analyses help non-experts judge the relative risks of different choices, and evaluate the likely results of different policy options. Examples include the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), the U.S. CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization (WHO). The programmers who are trying to draw public attention to the risks of AI and possible mitigation strategies are another example. Individual scientists also play a major role in helping us understand how to sensibly interpret climate and other predictive models. Especially valuable (though often criticized) are the skeptics who ask hard questions of the experts, forcing them to explain their thinking and respond to alternative lines of reasoning in ways that force them to improve the quality of their analyses and explanations.
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