PERSON
Sheila Jasanoff
The science and technology scholar who gave democracies the tools to govern what they cannot fully understand—co-production, civic epistemology, and technologies of humility—and who now turns that toolkit on the AI governance crisis with characteristically uncomfortable precision.
Sheila Jasanoff has spent forty years studying how societies make decisions about science and technology they do not fully understand, and her career has produced three concepts that the AI age needs more urgently than almost any framework currently circulating in governance discussions.
Co-production is her foundational thesis: scientific knowledge and social order are not produced sequentially—the technology does not arrive and then society adapts—but simultaneously, each constituting the other in real time.
Civic epistemology is her comparative framework: different societies have different culturally embedded ways of producing and validating public knowledge, and AI governance frameworks diverge across nations not merely because of different political preferences but because of different knowledge cultures.
Technologies of humility is her prescription: the institutional practices designed to govern under genuine uncertainty—attending to framing, vulnerability, distribution, and learning rather than producing the illusion of calculable risk. Born in Patna, India in 1944, trained in law and then in the emerging field of science and