In this hour-long virtual discussion, Rajiv Sethi, Divya Siddarth, and E. Glen Weyl discuss the Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience: Massive Scale Testing, Tracing, and Supported Isolation (TTSI) as the Path to Pandemic Resilience for a Free Society. This plan, developed by a bipartisan group of experts in economics, public health, technology, and ethics from across the country, lays out how a massive scale-up of testing, paired with contact tracing and supported isolation, can rebuild trust in our personal safety and re-mobilize the U.S. economy. The presenters are contributing authors to the roadmap, which was recently published by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
ABOUT RAJIV SETHI:
Rajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at Santa Fe Institute. He has previously held visiting positions at Microsoft Research and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy.
His current research deals with information and beliefs. In collaboration with Brendan O’Flaherty, he has examined the manner in which stereotypes affect interactions among strangers, especially in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. Their book, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.
Rajiv is also currently working on the forecasting of geopolitical events using methods that combine machine models with human judgment. This involves the development of prediction markets in which trading bots representing machine models interact with human traders to generate hybrid forecasts.
ABOUT DIVYA SIDDARTH:
Divya Siddarth works on building, testing, and studying impactful technology. Her work covers a broad range of applications in the intersection of technology and society, including digital work, political communication, digital security and privacy, and tech-augmented cooperation and collectivization.
She is currently a Fellow at Microsoft Research India, and has done extensive fieldwork in urban and rural contexts, studying and implementing large-scale technology interventions for societal good. Her work has been published in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, and the ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development, and is forthcoming in Information, Communication, and Society. She has previously taught classes at Stanford University in both the computer science and political science departments, in collaboration with the Digital Civil Society Lab.
ABOUT E. GLEN WEYL:
E. (Eric) Glen Weyl uses ideas from political economy to develop social technology for widely-shared prosperity and diverse cooperation. These ideas have inspired a social movement, RadicalxChange, that convenes activists, artists, entrepreneurs and researchers using information technology and market mechanisms to create a richer and more equal society. Glen helps catalyze this collaboration as Founder and Chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation. In his day job as Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST), Glen advises Microsoft’s senior leaders on the relationship between the global political economy and the future of technology and leads a group of socially-engaged communicator-researchers who are working to imagine and communicate a pluralistic future for technology that empowers human collaboration, creativity and communication.
Glen’s work focuses on “political economy”, a philosophically-inclined field of inquiry that gave birth to modern economics, sociology and political science, as a way to build “social technology”, algorithmic designs for social institutions. He has developed these ideas through academic research in a range of fields, for example articles published in the American Economic Review, Science, the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, the Harvard Law Review and Politics, Philosophy and Economics and has taught at Princeton and Yale. However, following his 2018 book with Eric A. Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, his work has moved significantly beyond research and he increasingly helps mobilize activist groups, consults for governments and political parties, advises start-ups (especially in the blockchain space) and collaborates with artists. WIRED profiled him as one of 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology and Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the 50 most influential people of 2018.