2019 Ditchley Foundation Conference

Welcome to the discussion about the Ditchley Foundation conference on the intersection of machine learning and genetic engineering, 7-9 February
Hackuarium Association Hackuarium is invited to help shape policies and drive a discussion around 3 topics

The intersection of machine learning and genetic engineering: what should be our checklist for society and state as we blast off?

Discussion in Working Groups

Working group meetings are held in the Tapestry Room, the Library and the West Wing Drawing Room. (The Tapestry Room is located on the front western side of the House, and the West Wing Drawing Room on the west side, through the colonnade).

GROUP A

The impact on health, personal identity, purpose and the relationship between groups of people Questions such as those from 1-12 in the terms of reference.

GROUP B

National economies, work, equality, society and democracy Questions such as those from 13-23 in the terms of reference.

GROUP C

Competition and power struggles between states Questions such as those from 24-33 in the terms of reference. The division into separate groups is necessarily arbitrary. While concentrating on the main topic devolved to them, groups should not worry unduly about overlap where that seems useful.

HAKUARIUM IS NOW COLLECTING KEY DISCUSSION POINTS AND ARGUMENTS

• your point/question/argument

..

POLICY-MAKING: THINKING-THROUGH-MAKING AND KNOWING-FROM-THE-INSIDE

Policy-making, thinking through making, knowing form the inside

Making through thinking in a manner of scientific experimentation and the design principles built on it is a way of knowing from the outside. It places the knowing outside the world oneself was used to know about. Thinking through making puts that relation in reverse. It is a way of knowing from inside.

Here knowledge is not created through an encounter between minds already furnished with concepts and a material world already populated with objects but rather such knowledge grows from the crucible of our own practical and observational engagements with the materials, beings and things all around us in the very processes of thought.

So, this is a knowledge that doesn't wrap things up from the outside and enclose them with our knowledge. Rather it is a kind of knowledge that grows from the inside of being in the unfolding of life.

The problem with currently dominant ways of thinking in modern technoscience and in the kinds of policymaking that depends on modern technologies is that we have got the relation between knowing and being the wrong way around. That is why techno scientifically driven policy continues to deliver solutions that are unsustainable. By sustainability here we do not mean reaching some kind of steady state. but simply being able to carry on, not doing the same things but able to carry life on.

A lot of the spaces for modern policymaking make it increasingly difficult for people to carry on their lives by placing knowing on the outside of being, or by wrapping things up (blackboxing them) in our own preconceptions and categorical frameworks. We close them up leaving no room for « growth » (as in evolution, development, ideas to unfold naturally, from the inside).

By the same token, we cut knowing off from the immediacy of our own visceral sensory engagement with the world of our everyday lives. It seems that the more knowledgeable we become the less attention we pay to what is going on around us in our environment.

For example science is telling us a lot about climate change these days ... but the science does not encourage us to look very carefully at what's going around us going on around as it tells us the emissions of the graphs and tables and databases, so that we don't actually notice that there's something awfully wrong with the population of bees here in Britain, (and elsewhere.)

This is an example of the way in which an obsession with big science can actually stop us can pay attention to what is actually going on underneath our very noses. It has dumped information and dazzled us by images from screens, like in this lecture theaters which are darkened so we can't see what's going on outside or around us.

Policy-making including the thinking-through-making places the knowing inside the world oneself was used to know about. Thinking through making puts that relation in reverse. It is a way of knowing from inside.