> We ask students: ‘What is the most pressing
problem that economists should address?’
What should we ask Computer Science students?
I can try it on a couple of hundred tomorrow and get back to you. I don't know what they will say.
What should we ask Computer Science students?
I can try it on a couple of hundred tomorrow and get back to you. I don't know what they will say.
"What is the most important problem (of policy, not of specific technology development) that Computer Scientists should be addressing and currently are not?"
(The parenthetical is to forestall nearly-content-free responses like "We should do more with AI!" and similar.)
Developing a very specific technology might help solve a social problem if it's applied properly and if social scientists believe that this particular technology will actually have the intended social effect and not backfire.
Other than that, I'd argue that computer scientists can (and likely should) have an informed opinion on various policy problems and how technology could affect them (or be affected by them), but that it's not their role, skillset or responsibility to address any policy problems; if they're tackling policy problems, then they're doing it "wearing a hat" of a citizen-activist, but not really as a practitioner of computer science - if there's an argument that they should be tackling a particular policy problem, then that's only if everyone should be tackling that policy problem, not particularly for the field of computer science and the related technologies.
My answer would be: the problem that we always do "introducing a new technology" and "thinking about the consequences of it" in the wrong order.