Predicting fires and landslides. Optimizing public transportation. Rooting out hate speech. Fighting opioid addiction and deaths. Curbing algorithmic bias. Technology is a powerful tool that can help government officials take on all these problems and many others areas critical to the public interest and well-being.
While the use of technology to improve government and serve the public interest is not a new endeavor, there is new energy behind defining and promoting "public interest technology" as a field unto itself, and new resources being invested to strengthen it nationwide.
"There's an effort to democratize access to information," said Christopher Goranson, Distinguished Service Professor at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "What we've seen is that technology can leave people out and we're seeing a pushback against that. There's an interest in empowering citizens, and breaking down barriers between citizens and the governments that are supposed to serve them, so there's greater accountability."
Public interest technology also provides new opportunities to amplify diverse viewpoints. Goranson emphasizes that with many of the problems created or exacerbated by technology, it's likely that someone with the right background or perspective could have predicted those negative outcomes earlier in the process.
"We need to make those voices louder and bring them to the table, whether it's at a corporate level or a government level, so that we can avoid running into some of these problems in the first place," he said.
Yulia Tsvetkov, assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science, emphasizes the importance of bringing diverse people together, as many technological problems are too complex and knotty to solve within any one discipline.
So, who needs a seat at the table?
"It's problem-specific," said Tsvetkov, "but I think the list would include experts in technology, experts in policy, statisticians, social scientists who understand peoples' psychology, activists who understand peoples' needs, lawyers who understand what's possible and what's not, and directors of big companies who have the money to sponsor this research."
"That's a great summary," said Goranson, adding that he would include designers and experts in human-computer interaction.