IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023 - 65

Figure 3. Commissioning ceremony at U.S.
Department of State.
deeply with the shape my life took after moving to
Australia in the 1990s and shifting careers. Here I
was at the end of the Cold War, unemployable in
Australia and seeking to work out what I might do
because (at that point in time) the experience I
had with arms control, the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, and shifting power in Crimea and Soviet
Central Asia had little value on the job market! However,
in trying to understand how my security studies
experience might be of value in my new country,
I ended up on a new path. While trying to identify
possible job or research pathways available to me,
I found myself struggling to find the right words to
look for work relevant to my experience. Sitting in
a local research library trying to understand how to
effectively use the search tools at my disposal, I realized
that I was not able to make use of these search
systems because my understanding of the tradecraft
words I had been using effectively for more than a
decade before my arrival in Australia did not match
up with common usage in these local systems. The
term " security studies " in Australia was less associated
with global security, arms control, or nuclear
studies; instead, the term pointed to information
and situations associated with banking and financial
security. Little did I know that trying to solve
that puzzle ended up putting me on the path to a
PhD in information science, where my arms control
past once again transformed itself in me, providing
the transdisciplinary framework to investigate
meaning in two very different worlds (this time,
humans and machines) needing to somehow meet
in the middle.
In my scholarly journey, I started in the social
sciences and the political sciences with a touch of
June 2023
physics, then moved into politics, and then back
into information science. Social informatics with
its appreciation of the interplay between people,
information/data, and technologies, therefore, just
felt like a natural fit. Curiously, as I reflect on my
Cold War past, I see those shadows of lived experiences
once again appearing in the perennial
themes of my work: articulation work, emerging
technology, politics of categorization and classification,
sociotechnical infrastructures, and unintended
consequences (for overview, see [8], [9],
[10], and [11]).
A key driver since that day in the State Library
has been an interest in seeking to understand how
to represent the human pursuit of what it is that
we are looking for, and how we know when we
have found it versus the way that representations
are placed in machines. In earlier work, I share
the way Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay, As we may
think, inspired my own efforts to design computational
tools to extend human thought [10]. Timing
is everything-I happened to be working on information
systems and understanding the human
side of things at a time when networked information
systems were relatively new. But maybe, as
Rilke writes, my past predicted my future to that
certain extent, and playing with the ideas of uncertainty
and creativity.
Seeing securitization as a complex
sociotechnical system
" Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be
understood " [12, p.v.].
This quote attributed to Marie Curie reminds us to
lean into our uncertainty, to make the time to understand
more so that we may fear less. Building on the
reflective snapshots shared above, the rest of this
essay focuses on seven lessons we can take into our
sociotechnical future.
Reflecting on my own life experiences and the
stories of my parents and family, I am inclined to
see the pursuit of security as perpetual. Given the
dynamic state of existence, that pursuit can never
end, there is no point where you are completely
and definitively secure in all parts of your existence.
You are simply on a journey of security. Given that
AI-informed futures and the rise of machines are
often referred to as the next arms race, thinking
of the pursuit of security as a race that never ends
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023

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