An Uneasy Interdependence: When Science Meets Power
Catch-up on Jericho Conversations with Sir Geoff Mulgan
In case you missed it, we recently interviewed Sir Geoff Mulgan, as part of our Jericho Conversations series.
Geoff Mulgan is one of our smartest thinkers. He was Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (and before that Director of the Performance and Innovation Unit); Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street under British Prime Minister Tony Blair; Co-founder and Director of the London-based think tank Demos (from 1993 to 1998); and Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s. Geoff is now a Professor of Collective Intelligence, Social Innovation and Public Policy at University College, London.
When Science Meets Power is the timely title of Sir Geoff Mulgan’s new book, the themes of which were explored in this conversation. Jericho partner Matthew Gwyther spoke to Geoff about big tech and AI, the response to COVID and the future of the relationship between science and politics.
Thank you for joining us (if you did), and sorry you missed it (if you didn’t!). It was a great conversation. Below we’ve captured some of the best bits from the webinar and you can listen to the episode as a podcast here:
Was it the COVID-19 pandemic that made you put pen to paper and author When Science Meets Power?
Yes, I’ve spent my working life somewhere on the boundaries of science, engineering, technology, and politics and COVID brought these to the fore. Here you had the world's biggest simultaneous crisis which required a lot of complex science to understand what was happening.
It was a big challenge to governments and crystallised a much bigger, longer-term trend which was essentially that more and more politics has to deal with issues that cannot be understood without quite a lot of science, but our politicians aren’t often well prepared to understand. Just saying ‘follow the science’ turned out to be implausible because at some points they had to make judgements balancing the interests of the old and the young, health and the economy which science couldn’t give any answers to.
Scientists didn’t come out well from the crisis either. The scientific community wasn’t very honest about things and deflected criticisms. Something has gone wrong [in the relationship between science and politics] and the book is about standing back, as science becomes more central to politics, and rethinking how both are organised and their bridging institutions and how in the next ten years we might do that.
If COVID had hit when you were director of policy under Tony Blair, what do you think you might have done differently compared to how Johnson’s government handled it?
In 2022, I did some research looking at how governments around the world organised their intelligence through the crisis. We talked to lots of people in the heart of governments from Singapore, Taiwan, Finland, Germany, the UK and so on.
Across the board, the COVID crisis needed strategic capability at the heart of government, people who could bring in the data, question the models, and tap into the frontline communities. Lots of different kinds of intelligence to be brought together and then synthesised to guide decisions. In the British system, almost all of that strategic capability had gone. A perfectly smart chief scientist but no machinery of synthesis.
“There was no one who could really pull these things together and in a coherent way”.
Some governments did have that and did perform significantly better. I hope one of the lessons of the inquiry, which is now underway, will be that we need significantly more intelligent strategic capability.
There were a series of biases in how the brain of government worked. Partly reflective of the people – people very much from pharmaceutical backgrounds but without experience in mental health or sensitivity to the issues facing young people.
The care sector was another field that was completely voiceless. Lacking channels of communication into decision-making. The cabinet office had advisory committees of experts, SAGE and so on. The treasury literally refused to have anything equivalent for advice on the economy.
“There was a whole series of pretty basic flaws in the machinery of government. I think we’re lucky it wasn’t even worse than it was and some clear lessons for the future”.
We have to make sure data from the front line is being heard and capacity is there to bring it all together and make judgements. I don’t particularly blame Boris Johnson, but I do complain about how strange it is that politicians are almost the only serious leadership role with no training and this is weird. Their tasks are much more technical than 100 years ago, they have to make complex decisions about bailing out the banks in a financial crisis, complex infrastructure projects and it could be a pandemic. At a minimum, we need to be doing more systematic preparation of our politicians.
What was Brown’s training and how did he learn how to deal with the financial crisis as well as he did?
Brown is a bright politician with 10 years being chancellor before the financial crisis, so he’d learnt a huge amount on the job and pulled it all together and deployed it during the crisis.
“I think we need to rethink the role of the politician,
they are woefully underprepared”.
There are some countries which really do train politicians, China for example. They take very seriously that their decision-makers should understand trends in technology, geopolitics etc. Here, in the UK we just throw bright amateurs into incredibly difficult jobs and from day one they’re expected to make decisions, it’s no wonder that they struggle.
Is the ability to scientise politics, as the leave campaign did, concerning to you? What about the potential for science in politics to be misused?
Overall, I actually advocate for the scientisation of politics and government – by which I mean – the use of data, evidence, the use of experiments. They can play a healthy role in politics. Governments which institutionalise the scientific method, rather than ones which use intuition or just try out a policy on the entire country, seem to me like progress.
Also, overall I advocate for the politicisation of science. Scientists need to be aware of the political context of their knowledge and its uses. They can’t detach themselves and pretend they are completely autonomous and have no responsibility for its use in the real world.
There needs to be a crucial shift everywhere to more accountability for what gets funded. Nowhere has really asked the public, what do you think? Where that funding should be allocated? The democratisation of science is needed, the need for a new social contract between the world of science and the people.
There are always going to be uncomfortable opportunities for any ideology to mobilise some science and twist it to its ends. Becoming aware of the history is useful to keep us aware of these misuses.
Isn’t everything going to become scientific and will politics become redundant?
Not at all, I think the key is that science cannot tell you what matters. You can’t have a correct answer without scientific input but there are a whole load of other issues to do with ethics, culture and values.
“Essentially science is fantastic at telling you what is – the facts of the world – but it can’t tell you what matters”.
Politics, at its best should help us decide what really matters but is less good at understanding the facts of the world. Some kind of hybrid is needed to guide us through these incredibly difficult decisions.
What examples are there of where a scientific and political union has worked well?
There was much discussion around IVF for example and many felt deeply anxious. There was a huge national and parliamentary debate which led to the creation of a powerful regulator whose role was to decide what science could/ should do and then justify this to the public.
It’s been a successful model allowing science to progress with public legitimacy. Nothing like this happened when the Internet came along, when AI came along and so there is a huge governance gap. This is a consequence of a much bigger issue which is confidence in creating new public institutions. This was much stronger decades ago – the HFEA was perhaps the end of a particular era in confidence in public action. With new technologies, much is ungoverned and can create all sorts of problems.
I think this is changing, in the 2000s when the internet became part of daily life, big tech was successful in scaring governments away from regulation – it’s the enemy of science etc.
“Big tech got away with it for a long time partly because a lot of politicians didn’t understand it enough. Historians will be astonished at how weak politics were at handling it”.
I proposed a new global body on AI, and it was supported by some in big tech. Some support what the EU is doing on AI regulation. Biden did an executive order on AI and China has quite sophisticated laws on AI too. The mood of debate has shifted away from where it was 20 years ago.
What about Science and democracy?
Autocracies have problems with science because they often suppress uncomfortable information. Suppression squeezes out the space for exploration and creative thought
I love the slogan of the Royal Society, ‘nullius in verba' or 'take nobody's word for it'. It founds modern science in doubt and scepticism. The best approach to a scientific claim is to doubt it and we need this built into democracy and government. We need, built into the policy-making process of governments, all sorts of challenges otherwise we risk following the evidence that best supports your hunches.
“A mindset of constant integration and doubt is so important especially where science hits power”.
There are many democracy reimagination projects. How can you organise the liberation of people on a particular topic in a way which doesn’t lead to polarisation?
This is where the collective intelligence field has developed many models including citizens assemblies and some AI Polis tools which help people come towards consensus rather than tending to polarisation. My hope is we will see more use of these democratic innovations and tools especially around difficult policies.
Traditional politics isn’t legitimating the difficult decisions we are facing, we need to use the internet and all the different online tools to guide us so that people feel they’ve taken part in a decision such that when a decision is made, they may not agree with it, but they view it as fair and legitimate.
How do we fix these broken systems?
It's never very wise for a government to think they can fix something from the outside. Systems thinking should be a starting point, you can’t do things to people you need to persuade and bring people into the process of learning and discovery.
Referring to the Horizon scandal, I was a number ten representative working out what to do with this project and I gave evidence at the inquiry. I discussed in a ‘lessons learned’ note that again and again, the rules of people making decisions included no one with a technical background.
I thought the tech looked flawed, the scope was wrong and this got suppressed as ‘too difficult a topic’. I was not the only person recommending this, but I was blunt in my warnings. The reason it wasn’t ditched or fixed was a mixture of expedience and pragmatism and the need not to alienate Japanese investment but a lot of it was due to a lack of capability and expertise at the top.
It was the last of these big top-down and secret projects and it's exactly the opposite of lean and agile software development. The postmasters should have been part of the co-creation. There are big lessons for government justice here.
An Inconvenient Truth…
The crux is that science tells us about the interdependence of many things and people resist this. I would hate to live in a society that was totally free in the sense that you can believe whatever you like and without the constraints of scientific truth.
Climate change is the obvious example, science tells us that replacing 80% of beef with mycoprotein would eliminate about 90% of forest loss globally. Scientific facts such as these are uncomfortable for all of us, it’s a universal challenge.
In addition, there are extraordinary conspiracy theories which have been allowed to spread without any governance or attention. I advocated more than twenty years ago that Google should build in truth measures. We need to teach kids about misinformation and we’ve been so slow to realise why society is being destroyed by our failure to attend to the spread of lies.
The key feature of an education system is to create people who can be enthusiastic about something and also sceptical of it. It’s the kind of mentality we need on many subjects. How do you know what you believe and how could you be convinced otherwise? Not being able to answer these questions is a problem and we need to be reskilled as a society with this dual way of thinking.
“Wisdom means constantly questioning yourself and when something that you don’t expect happens, don’t ignore it, amend your beliefs and learn about and from the uncomfortable surprises”.
About #JerichoConversations
Jericho Conversations is one of a number of initiatives that spontaneously emerged during the first COVID lockdown – part of a determination to use moments of crisis to pivot towards a better, fairer, more equitable and sustainable future for all. By popular demand, we have reignited the series to help find surprising and refreshing solutions and insights into a world in constant flux. Each conversation – led by an expert speaker – is designed to keep Jericho communities engaged and thinking about “what comes next?” for business and society.
Rebecca Cagigao
January 2024