Assigning meaning to NEST by technology futures: extended responsibility of technology assessment in RRI

ABSTRACT

Objects of responsibility reflections in responsible research and innovation (RRI) emerge at the intersection of projections about future technology and future society. They intersect in a more or less distant future that can be called ‘technology futures’. These are the main medium of assigning social, ethical, and cultural meaning to new and emerging science and technology (NEST) fields – and it is exactly this meaning which gives rise to public, political, and ethical debates on NEST. This assignment of meaning is, it is argued, the most upstream point reachable in RRI: it is simply the origin of respective debates and reasoning. As such, initial assignments of meaning can have high influence on subsequent debate, for example, in determining what is regarded as chance or risk. This perspective gives rise to a major conclusion concerning the scope of responsibilities in RRI. While usually the responsibility for the possible future consequences of NEST is made an issue to RRI, I will argue for extending the scope of responsibility: the assignment of meaning to NEST must itself be made an object of responsibility. This extension has consequences for the roles of technology assessment in RRI.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology futures
• meaning
• technology assessment
• hermeneutic turn
• hermeneutic circle
• responsibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Prof. Dr Armin Grunwald has been Full professor at Karlsruhe Technical University since 2007. He studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the universities of Munster and Cologne, and obtained Diploma of Physics in 1983. He did his Graduate studies at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne during 1983–1987. He received his Habilitation at the faculty of social sciences and philosophy of the Philipps-University Marburg in 1998.

He served as Systems engineer and project manager at Systems Research Laboratories GmbH (Cologne) during 1987–1991 (Software Engineering), and as Scientist at the Department of Systems Analysis of the German Center for Aerospace (DLR) during 1991–1995 (Technology Assessment). He also served as Vice director of the European Academy Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler during 1996–1999. He has been Director of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at the Research Centre Karlsruhe and full professor at Freiburg university since 1999, and Director of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB) since 2002. His research interests include: Concepts and methods of Technology Assessment, Ethics of Technology, Philosophy of Science, and Sustainable Development.

Notes

1. The recent debate on ‘Visioneering’ (McCray 2013; Sand 2016) has raised the question of the responsibility of the visioneers (Cabrera Trujillo 2014), which has a close relation to the issues of this paper.

2. While the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) considers the role of science and technology in collective visions of good and attainable futures that are then often used by policymakers (e.g. to legitimate research funding), the perspective in this paper is different. It looks at how societal visions, expectations, concerns or fears contribute to the assignment of meaning to new science and technology, which then can give rise to an ethical or political debate.

3. A further mechanism of the creation and assignment of meaning to NEST is how new sciences and technologies are defined and characterized. This mechanism is not addressed in this paper (see Grunwald 2016, Ch. 4).

4. This argument is in line with Cabrera Trujillo (2014) stating that visioneering should be made the object of responsibility exactly because engineered visions could have huge consequences.

5. The activities of visioneers (McCray 2013) is one specific category of such a stimulus which gained specific awareness under responsibility aspects (Cabrera Trujillo 2014; Sand 2016; Simakova and Coenen 2013).

6. See, for examples, the activities of the members of the European Parliamentary Technology Assessment Network EPTA (www.eptanetwork.org).