- Human development has been described by Selim Jahan (head of the UNDP program) as “development of the people (capital), for the people (translated to the lives of people) and by the people (people are not only receiving but active participant in the process).” How have we done as a humanity to fulfill this hope originally manifested through the Gettysburg address?
- In an interview, Salim Jahan says that the ultimate goal of human development is to “broaden your choices.” This parallels Amartya Sen’s thesis that the key to human development is increasing people’s freedoms.
- When I look at the world around me, specifically at the United States and its policies in recent years, I believe that we have strived towards increasing the freedoms of the people in this country. This can be seen extremely recently in the passing of the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in the Senate, which will go towards improving travel and internet connection across the nation, among other development goals. While some areas of the bill have been controversial, I still see the passing of the bill as a move toward expanding the freedoms of people in the United States by providing them access to better resources. There is definitely much more that needs to be done, but the United States is at least currently moving in the right direction.
- Does data science have a role to play in advancing the human condition? What role does complexity play in advancing our understanding of global human development processes and their multitude of dimensions?
- Data science, and more specifically, big data, has a huge role to play in what the future of human development looks like, but its application needs to be treated with care. The essays we’ve read in class, specifically from Blumenstock and Barder, warn us of the dangers that big data may bring. Blumenstock talks about how data science can only exemplify the bias shown by its applicators, which is why those applicators must exercise caution in how they use it. Barder elaborates on this idea by pointing out the faults in “silver bullet” solutions. Like human development, big data is extremely complex and can be affected by a countless number of factors. Many of the start-ups and projects we see today using big data run into large logistical or ethical problems down the road. The only way to prevent this is to treat big data as a tool that must be used with care and nuance.
- The most interesting part of Barder’s talk for me was showcasing how researchers took advantage of natural evolution in order to improve a complex system. I believe this should be applied to human development as well. Working on a small scale and making random mutations to a situation until an improvement is found is a solid, non-biased way to approach human betterment.
- In order to predict valuable solutions to some of the worlds most intractable problems, will combined domain expertise from the perspective of computer science & statistics with global human development be sufficient, or is a new integrated paradigm needed? What hope do we have in selecting the best future path for humanity?
- Combined expertise will always make finding solutions better. This is because bringing more perspectives to the table increases the chances of eliminating bias, which is one of the biggest dangers for data-oriented research. However, this does not just apply to computer science and data science. There are many kinds of perspectives that would help in finding human development solutions. For example, environmentalists who understand how infrastructure affects the environment, humanitarians who have real experience working in places that will be affected by these solutions, and historians who can look at a country’s past for answers are just a few kinds of career paths that should be involved in these efforts. By putting research under extreme scrutiny, removing bias and preconceptions, and tackling complex systems in ways that we know are effective, we will be much more efficient at solving the problems facing the world.
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