Topics in Domestic Policy: Policymaking and Ethical Challenges from Advances in Science & Tech

Advances in science and technology bring about opportunities as well as many thorny societal challenges. From nuclear weapons to artificial intelligence, from genetic engineering to research on pandemic potential pathogens, these new frontiers of knowledge evoke questions central to societal ethics ranging from long-standing ones to new dilemmas emerging from the evolving scientific and technological prowess. This course studies this history in key fields and examines how practitioners, policy-makers and the public have grappled with them in the past, as well as reviewing some current challenges.