Data Centers
How Communities Are Bargaining With Big Tech Over Data Centers
Data centers have become tests of whether and how local governments can negotiate the physical terms of the AI economy.
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Focused Research Investments
Nova Scotia’s Experiment in Research That Solves Real Problems
Locally focused research investments enable coalitions of scientists and citizens to serve community needs.
Poem
Meet Zoom AI Companion
You have been lonely all these years.
You once loved a French lop named Cleo.
You once loved a boy named Rabbit….
AI Oversight
Escaping AI’s Measurement Trap
Oversight of artificial intelligence is largely built on benchmarks that fail to capture how models have learned to “perform for the test.” A better system would govern through learning and inquiry.
Urban Robots
Make Room for Robots
As robot-human interactions become more commonplace in urban spaces, policymakers can use a diagnostic to find the best existing tools for governance and determine when new ones are needed.
Autonomous Vehicles
A Crash Course for Robotaxis
After a plane crash, the entire aviation industry learns from the failure. Autonomous vehicle companies should adopt a similar standard.
Editor’s Journal
Tapping the Revolutionary Potential of “Useful Knowledge”
The science practiced by the founders and other early Americans was sociable rather than professional, with “useful knowledge” seen as a path to building better people and citizens. Can this approach help today’s scientific enterprise?
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Counting the Benefits of Clean Air Regulations
By abandoning its longstanding practice of estimating the financial value of health benefits from pollution reduction, the Environmental Protection Agency is raising the question of how durable evidence-based policy will be built in the future.
Book Review
Incriminating Ourselves
If you’ve ever felt uneasy sharing something sensitive online, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s Your Data Will Be Used Against You is “the book that may finally explain why your unease is justified and why our world increasingly feels like an episode of Black Mirror,” writes J. B. Branch.
Democratic Accountability
Who Should Decide How to Use Taxpayer Dollars to Fund Scientific Research?
After the firing of the National Science Board, legislators have an opportunity to establish a new balance between democratic accountability and protection from partisan meddling.
Applied AI Workforce
Community Colleges Are Training the Applied AI Workforce
As artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market, community colleges are a practical engine for training workers at scale to develop the skills and fluency they need to get jobs.
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Rules for Robots
Vol. XLII, No. 4, Summer 2026
As robots increasingly become part of the urban landscape, local officials must ensure that they are integrated safely and efficiently. There are a lot of existing rules governing vehicles and devices in cities, but which ones should apply to robots and when should new rules be considered? The essays in the Summer 2026 Issues explore this and many other topics, including how community colleges are training the AI workforce, the future of the National Science Board, assessing the costs and benefits of clean air regulations, and how communities are learning to bargain with big tech companies over data centers.
Browse the Issue
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In response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.
Summer 2026
Autonomy Is the Pulsing Heart of Science
A Discussion of
Merton Redux: Re-Confronting the Norms of Science in Democracy
Responses By
Summer 2026
Recognize the Connections
A Discussion of
We Created a Survey to Measure Community Well-Being and Activated a “Messy Middle”
Responses By
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Prompts for a Perfect Daughter
A young protagonist is forced to follow strict prompts embedded deep in her brain via an implant. The protagonist’s parents installed the brain implant in the hopes of guiding their child to live a “good” life. But when the family immigrates to a place whose customs and language diverge from their own, the protagonist is torn between internal and external prompts—and discovers how quickly they can both become a trap.
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From Gospel to Guide
Familial and cultural prompts shape children’s experiences of relationships and themselves—especially among children in diaspora. How do those prompts change over time?
Response
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Mirror, Mirror
What happens when you hold someone’s gaze—really hold it? An artist and an inventor try to recreate that experience in Sofia Samatar’s Future Tense Fiction story. Absorbed in detail and technicalities, they neglect a more fundamental question: Will they be ready to see what their technology reflects back to them?
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In the Blink of an Eye
How does emotion travel through our eyes? In his response to Sofia Samatar’s story, video game designer Will Hellwarth shares his quest to create a narrative world that responds to a player’s blink.
Response
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Golden Rule
In an alternative legal system built on the concept of “an eye for an eye,” if you commit a crime, your punishment is that someday a network of state agents will perpetrate the same crime against you. These ministers, themselves survivors of violence, follow the principle of “commensurate severity.” When one such minister is assigned to a kidnapping case, she’s forced to determine what justice really looks like.
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The Purpose of Punishment
What does it mean for a punishment to truly fit a crime? A post-conviction attorney explores the limits of a criminal legal system built on retribution.
Response
Over four decades, Issues has hosted many articles discussing science’s “social contract”—the idea, as physicist Harvey Brooks articulated it in 1988, that the scientific enterprise would provide “social benefits in exchange for an unusual degree of self-governance and financial support free of strings.” Today, this contract is clearly defunct: The federal government has cut funding for science, cast doubt on scientific findings, and prioritized investment in research outside the university system. Whatever the future of federally funded science is, it’s no longer “free of strings.” As the scientific enterprise tries to decide how to respond, it first needs to figure out what happened.
This collection is part of an exploration of science’s social contract that is generously supported by The Kavli Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Dana Foundation.
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Merton Redux: Re-Confronting the Norms of Science in Democracy
Although public attention is focused on the federal government’s efforts to slash funding for scientific research, the decimation of the democratic institutional processes that undergird state-sponsored scientific research is far more consequential.
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A Science Funding System Beyond the Linear Model
To improve the relationship between science and the public, funders should embrace a new ontology of scientific work that aligns incentives with society’s goals.
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How the American Research University Survives
University leadership needs to shift attention from chasing prestige to crafting strategies for long-term success.
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Discussing Science’s “Social Contract”
If the public funds science and gives it autonomy to govern itself, then benefits such as economic growth, innovation, and national security will follow. This unwritten social contract was long thought to underpin policymakers’ relationship to the scientific enterprise, but recent events suggest those days are over.
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