Tech Lords are the new Public Intellectuals

Statician Andrew Gelman writes:

There’s a new hegemonic science in town, and it’s information science, or computer science. ...

Freudian psychiatry and neoclassical economics were powerful, all-explaining theories that addressed people’s concerns about mental health, happiness, prosperity, and future prospects. ...

Now I’d say that computer science today is like economics at the beginning of the century or Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s in being at apex academic and social prestige and influence. Computer scientists, or computer-science-associated businessmen, are the new gurus, in a way that wasn’t the case before. Yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were culture heroes back in the 80s and 90s, but nobody was particularly interested in what they had to say outside of their narrow technological realms. Nowadays, many computer scientists and tech lords present themselves, and are often taken as, all-purpose pundits. (Many of the tech lords are actually tech investors; they’ve absorbed the prestige of information science through the transitive property of money.) As with the economists and Freudians of past eras, they are presented as having some special authority derived in part from their almost inhuman hyper-rationality, a willingness to tell uncomfortable truths.

Yes, I think Economics is in decline, along with other social sciences.