Georg Schütte, Secretary General, Volkswagen Foundation, Germany

1.    AI, the anthropocene, and science policy

In this new era of technological disruptions and global transformations, we have to deal with the ambiguous nature of AI – and it will depend on us, as His Holiness Pope Francis states, to decide the degree to which it will bring “benefits or harm.” More than ever before, science and modern technologies that advanced research brings about shape the way we live, we work, and we relate to each other. For good reasons, therefore, science and research have become an object of public interest and public debate. At the same time, they have become an instrument of public policy making.

How do we define this political arena that we might call science policy? What are the global megatrends that currently shape the global scientific sphere? How do they affect international collaboration in science and research? And what does this mean for academies of science?

I will answer these questions from the perspective of a funding agency, the Volkswagen Foundation. This is one of Germany’s largest private funders of research and innovation. The foundation operates for the benefit of the public. It is an independent foundation which was established by the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Lower Saxony when the state-owned company Volkswagen went public. The two former owners put all the revenues into an endowment which is the foundation’s source of income.

I myself have worked in research management for 30 years. I have spent ten out of these 30 years in public administration as state – or permanent – secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. At the time of the 2024 Biennial Plenary, I was part of an Expert Group of the European Commission on the “Interim Evaluation of Horizon Europe” and the future of the 10th Framework Program. My presentation refers to the work of this group in multiple ways.[1]

2.    Science Policy

Science policy addresses the organizational context to generate new ideas and the distribution of expertise. It focuses on the production of scientific and scholarly knowledge and the role of knowledge networks and collaborations. Thus, science policy influences the organization and the conduct of science within society and its intermediating agencies and consortia. It is concerned with the allocation of resources to conduct science in the public interest. Science policy strives to strike a balance between the perceived public or general interests and the perceived self-interest within the science system.[2]

Science policy unfolds on the national as well as the international level. It usually is an instrument of soft power: it builds up reputation to attract interest, knowledge, talents and collaborators.[3]

While science and research per se strive for truth, even though it might only be a “temporary truth”, the political sphere is dominated by the functional logic of power execution. Therefore, whenever science enters the political sphere, these different functional logics lead to tensions and conflicts of interest.

3.    Megatrends in the global scientific sphere

3.1.        The end of the end of history or the return of great-power competition

More than 30 years ago, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. At the end of the Cold War, he expected that there would be only one remaining superpower and a ‘pax americana’. However, power politics have come back into international relations. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, violent conflicts in Darfur, in East Congo, and other regions in Africa, military tensions in the South China Sea – they all provide evidence that nations and violent groups consider war and aggression as means to resolve conflicts. The 1980s and 1990s seemed to support the idealistic notion that international relations in science and research can lead and can contribute to international understanding. The 2020s challenge this notion. The hard power of military conflicts overrides the soft power of international collaboration in science and research. We currently observe new frictions in research collaborations across borders and new restrictions on global academic mobility. No longer does the European Commission, for example, follow its former call for radical openness: open data, open science, open to the world. It rather calls for the new guideline: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.[4] Distrust in the political realm seems to challenge established relationships based on trust in science and research.

3.2.        The Worsening Climate Crisis

While science and research continue to provide evidence of the detrimental effects of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, international political mitigation and adaptation mechanisms are rather slow to react. The International Panel on Climate Change, for example, has developed a process to translate this increasing evidence into political recommendations. These recommendations are the basis for Conferences of Parties on Climate Change. And yet, major emitting nations have so far not agreed upon a coherent approach to reverse the current trends. Rather, wars and violent conflicts contribute to the worsening of the climate crisis. In addition, the loss of biodiversity resumes speed, and infectious diseases reappear and reach a hitherto unknown level. They are, amongst others, also the root causes of international migration.

3.3.        Rise of disruptive and generative technologies

Science and research continue to explore hitherto unknown territory. The rapid development of COVID vaccines is but one example of the power of long-term, curiosity-driven research turned into application for the benefit of humankind. The staggered provision of the vaccines, however, indicates that uneven international power relations continue to exist in the world of high-tech goods. While synthetic biology continues to revolutionize the life sciences and will bring about new drugs and new organisms that will shape and change our lives – for good and for bad, AI technologies will, to some extent, revolutionize knowledge production across all fields and disciplines and challenge the established mode of enlightened thinking and reasoning. A new knowledge order is taking shape on the horizon. AI technologies are now “reaching the point where their broad transformative potential – for business, science, humanity and the planet – is becoming more widely understood unleashing hopes and fears of utopias and dystopias”.[5]

3.4.        The Rise of U.S. and Chinese companies conducting research

Publicly funded research is no longer the sole driver of this development. Rather a small number of international high-tech companies, mainly from the United States and China, develop these new technologies and shape the general modes of their applications. In addition, they re-invest revenues from the high-tech enterprise in research and innovation. Thus, in the United States the share of federally funded research decreased from 30 percent in 2011 to 19 percent in 2021. Today, the business sector in the U.S. funds 36 percent of basic research which is close to the 40 percent share of the U.S. federal government.[6] This leads to new questions of ownership of knowledge and legitimation of research and innovation activities.

3.5.        Geopolitics of science and research

It is this context which leads to fundamental changes in the international scientific sphere. During the past ten years, China has emerged as a scientific and technological superpower. The European Union now considers China as partner, competitor, and systemic rival. As the EU Expert Panel observes: “The geopolitical frictions between China and the US can partially be explained by two factors: Firstly, the rise of disruptive technologies mentioned above and their growing importance for power (military, economic, political), and secondly, a rather dramatic shift in the global distribution of scientific resources from democracies to authoritarian regimes and from the West to the East. Regarding the latter factor, China is the dominant force in both phenomena. While China’s scientific rise has added tremendous resources to the global research enterprise of science, it is also challenging established systems, institutions and norms, due to its sheer size and the government’s ambitions, but also its view of the relationship between science and the state”.[7]

Academic mobility unfolds today in this new world of great power competition. While negative demographic developments in high-income countries propel the need to attract further talent, physical and social insecurity is a major driver of migration, including academic talent from low-income countries, leading to an uneven distribution of talents and intellectual progress around the globe.

In addition, research security has become a new field of concern. Nations and academic institutions deny access to certain fields of knowledge out of fear of espionage and illegal exploitation.

New restrictions on open academic discourse appear as international conflicts are being debated on national campuses. Faked news, distributed through online networks pose challenges to open societies and democracies.

3.6.        Speed of transitions

The speed of technological change and its adoption, the speed of transformation of the international order and of national societies, and the speed of ecological changes currently collides with the “embedded inertia in science systems” (OECD, 2023) and the slow decision-making processes in mature democracies. It increases both a sense of urgency and a sense of uncertainty, leading to friction within open democratic societies.

4.    The search for answers

How can science policy makers address these challenges? How can intermediating agencies like academies of science live up to this challenge? A number of pragmatic approaches seem conducive to coping with the megatrends mentioned above:

When geopolitical tensions contribute to a ‘securization’ of research collaboration, the OECD proposes to its members a three-fold approach: (1) protect and restrict flows of knowledge and technology which are of critical importance to individual countries, (2) promote and improve the domestic performance of the respective research and innovation systems, and (3) project the need to address global challenges to the international level and form international alliances.[8]

In order to adequately control knowledge flows and the respective risks involved, several countries have started to set up expert groups and monitoring agencies to observe science, research, innovation, foreign and security policies of other countries.

Transnational agencies like the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) play an important role to further facilitate research collaboration on planetary challenges across geopolitical blocks. While there is an in-built inertia in the process, it is nevertheless worthwhile to continue the efforts to translate research results into political action. Collaboration with and among diaspora researchers may further contribute to an ongoing international cooperation in these fields beyond national restrictions.

The rise of disruptive technologies like AI will lead to the creation of new architectures of knowledge. Given the ambivalent potential of AI, we need a smart and open regulation of these new technologies to unleash their potential for scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, we need to control the divisive power inherent in it. The adequate representation of indigenous knowledge seems to be just one indicator of the challenge of fair representation and just acknowledgement of ownership within these new architectures.

Deep tech innovations like AI advance the economic competitiveness of nations. Science policy makers need to make sure that researchers continue to be able to take advantage of these new technologies in the global public interest. Therefore, the Scientific Advice Mechanism to the European Commission recently issued a set of recommendations which addresses both the opportunities and the challenges of using Artificial Intelligence in science. The expert panel calls for the establishment of a European institute for AI in science to counter the dominance of a limited number of corporations over AI infrastructure and to empower public research across diverse disciplines. AI-powered scientific research requires a vast amount of data. Data should be of high quality, responsibly collected and meticulously curated, ensuring fair access for European researchers and innovators. The panel calls for transparent public AI models which help, among others, to increase the trustworthiness of AI and reinforce the reproducibility of research results. To help scientists enhance their overall efficiency, the panel advises the EU to support the development of AI tools and technologies specialized on scientific work (e.g., foundation models for science, scientific large language models, AI research assistants and other ways to use AI technologies). According to the group, prioritizing AI-powered research in areas like personalized healthcare and social cohesion, where data is abundant but difficult to interpret, would maximize benefits for EU citizens.[9]

Academies of science are, among others, important intermediaries at the interface of science and science policy. They can help scientists, policy makers, and the general public to understand and interpret the current state of scientific discoveries and scholarly knowledge. Academies are well-positioned to describe and analyze long-term trends in nature and society. They can reflect upon the ongoing challenges and introduce issues of concern. In this capacity, they can also serve as intermediator among generations. Mental health challenges among the younger generation today are but one indicator of generation-specific concerns about the future. They point to intergenerational challenges and the question of being good ancestors. Last, but not least, academies of science can open up arenas to deliberate about potential answers to the planetary challenges we face. They can help them to evaluate the challenges and opportunities of concrete political actions. Answers will not always be easy. But they are in high demand at a time when global challenges are larger than ever before.

[1] European Commission (2024), Align, Act, Accelerate. Research, Technology and Innovation to boost European competitiveness. Report of the Commission Expert Group on the Interim Evaluation of Horizon Europe. Brussels.

[2] Simon, Dagmar; Knie, Andreas, Hornbostel, Stefan; Zimmermann, Karin, Eds. (2016), Handbuch Wissenschaftspolitik, 2. Edition. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

[3] Schütte, Georg (2008): “Wettlauf ums Wissen: Außenwissenschaftspolitik als Herausforderung moderner Wissensgesellschaften“ in: Wettlauf ums Wissen. Außenwissenschaftspolitik im Zeitalter der Wissensrevolution. Berlin: Berlin University Press, p. 12-26.

[4] Schütte, Georg (2022), „Eiszeit für die Wissenschaft“ in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31. March 2022, p. 6.

[5] European Commission, p. 18.

[6] European Commission, p. 20.

[7] European Commission, p. 19.

[8] OECD (2023), OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2023: Enabling Transitions in Times of Disruption, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/0b55736e-en.

[9] Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (2024), Successful and timely uptake of Artificial Intelligence in science in the EU, European Commission, Brussels. The SAM opinion was requested by Executive Vice-President Vestager in July 2023. It complements a range of material that the Commission has developed on the use of AI in research and innovation.