Dr Dani Shanley writes a guest post about responsible innovation.
“Technology: Hero or Villain?” So reads the title of an article published in the LA Times in 1967. It states: where once “America had been a land of boundless optimism,” by the late 1960s, increasing pessimism seemed to reflect a “sour assessment of ‘progress’”. Concerns about emerging technologies were contributing to the “depressing feeling” that “technological ‘progress’ was creating new problems as fast, or faster, than it solved old ones”. At the same time, across much of Western Europe too, science and technology were the subject of increasing public ambivalence. For while modern technology may not have been producing the utopia it once promised, it was clear that its absence wouldn’t either.
It is almost impossible to avoid the hype surrounding AI, autonomous vehicles, cryptocurrency, or virtual reality.
Hero or villain; utopian or dystopian; good or bad… If you think for a minute about what we see in the media today, the landscape is full of similarly opposing claims, from public figures and tech journalists, CEOs and politicians; It is almost impossible to avoid the hype surrounding AI, autonomous vehicles, cryptocurrency, or virtual reality.
Depending on where you get your news, you might think that these technologies are going to make life easier for us all, making us happier and healthier in the process, or, that their benefits are sensationalized, that their risks are largely unknown, and that those involved in their development are unethical, immoral, and solely interested in turning a profit.
There is often a subtext to the hero or villain discussion, one which has been made increasingly explicit in recent years, which concerns what it means to develop technologies responsibly andhow technological change may trigger us to reevaluate what responsibility means.
Though thinking about what responsibility means in the context of scientific research and technological development is far from new, around the turn of the millennium, responsibility became an increasingly important concept in relation to research and innovation.
For example, we might think about how responsibility matters with regards to either the processes or societal impacts of technological change. Within the research system, codes of conduct and ethics committees have become commonplace. So too have a number of research funding criteria: for example, researchers are regularly required to include multiple perspectives in their research ; to think about the possible impacts of their research; and to attain some form of ethical clearance before starting their research. Research funding is also often organized around particular themes or focus areas, such as the UN’s sustainable development goals. Today, all of these efforts are broadly captured under the banner of responsible innovation.
Over the last decade or so, responsible innovation has become a popular way of thinking about whether or not we can define the right outcomes and impacts of research and innovation and subsequently, if we can agree upon these outcomes, whether we can be successful in directing innovation towards them.
it is clearly quite difficult to be against—as some have rightly asked, who could possibly be for irresponsible innovation
Internationally, this way of talking about responsibility-related concerns gained considerable traction particularly in the Netherlands, the UK,
Norway, and parts of the U.S. As a result, a variety of meetings, research groups, projects and networks have been involved in defining and institutionalizing the idea of responsible innovation.
In that responsible innovation broadly reflects valuable and worthy ambitions it is clearly quite difficult to be against—as some have rightly asked, who could possibly be for irresponsible innovation? Yet at the same time, the ambitions of responsible innovation do reflect a very particular set of concerns, over and above or perhaps even at the expense, of others.
It is important to recognize that as a way of envisioning responsibility and putting responsibility into practice, responsible innovation was not always already a matter of concern for academics and policymakers. Rather, responsible innovation came into being in a historically specific process that was shaped by previous approaches and methods which were also historically rooted in visions of how science and society (ought to) relate.
As such, it is important to consider how the web of evolving influence that shapes our understanding of responsible innovation today extends back into the distant past. Making sense of why responsible innovation reflects the concerns that it does therefore requires a critical examination of its history.
First of all, the way we talk about history often suggests that the wheels move only in one direction. For example, within the literature on responsible innovation, history is often used to support its objectives, providing a neat frame of reference for how things came to be in the present, essentially presenting the emergence of responsible innovation as the logical outcome of prior developments. From this point of view, responsible innovation is seen as an inevitable product of the past. Drawing upon less linear narratives helps to demonstrate the extent to which people have found visions of responsibility unconvincing—or at least only temporarily convincing at various times over the years.
Second, in policy making and innovation, the emphasis is often on looking towards the future. Though it is undoubtedly positive that we widely encourage anticipation of the future, it means that we often tend to overlook the lessons of history. In the case of responsible innovation, critical historical reflection not only adds nuance and depth when thinking about the imagined trajectories of technoscientific developments, but also provides important insights for thinking about the possible future(s) of the responsible innovation movement itself. In this sense, history may potentially offer us some guidance in the present. For while the present is never the same as the past, we can still learn important lessons from how things went before; or, as the old adage goes, history doesn’t repeat, but it does sometimes rhyme. Understanding the successes and failures of earlier movements could potentially inform and shape how we talk about and practice responsible innovation today.
Third, it is important that we consider who gets a say in constructing the historical narrative of an idea, a movement, or a field. We need to ask who it is who is doing the remembering. Historical reflection on responsible innovation, when it has taken place, has tended to come from insiders speaking from their own first-hand experiences. Such accounts are valuable and informative, yet, it is important to distinguish between practical pasts, which are largely based on individual experience and used as a means for people to make sense of their own lived experience in order to convey it to others; and historical pasts, which are the result of “critical enquiry”. Opening up the history of responsible innovation beyond existing insider accounts allows alternative accounts to come into view, potentially problematizing or at least providing context to the ways in which responsibility is being mobilized.
Finally, one of the problems with responsible innovation is that it focuses our attention on “innovation” – on the next big, shiny thing which promises to disrupt, transform or otherwise alter the way we live our lives, for better or worse. Responsible innovation itself was also presented as being new and transformative, with regards to the organization and functioning of the research system. Of course there has always been hype around what is new, but the problem is that this hype often clouds some of the real problems that we have, and perhaps should be spending our resources on solving. It may be far less exciting to think about infrastructures, or maintenance, for example, about the kinds of things that are essential to keeping things running – but if we are truly going to think about responsibility, and about what enables anything resembling the good life, then we also have to think about the systems, processes, and people that keep all the shiny, new things running once they become a part of our daily lives.
What histories of responsible innovation show us is that while some ideas about responsibility may have eroded and faded away, others have merely changed shape, poised to reemerge under the right conditions—say when proactive groups mobilize around alternative ideas about the future or when technological change catalyzes public concern. At a time when our world is confronted by numerous inescapable societal and environmental challenges, many of which are seen as the indirect consequences of scientific and technological developments, we must continue thinking about the different ways in which responsibility matters be that under the guise of responsible innovation, or, by any other name.
Dani Shanley is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Maastricht University working on the GuestXR project (www.guestxr.eu), which is about the construction of intelligent virtual environments. Her expertise is mainly within science and technology studies (STS) and the philosophy of technology, with a particular focus on reflexive, participatory design methodologies (or, responsible innovation), such as social labs and value sensitive design (VSD). She is primarily interested in questions concerning the ethics and politics of emerging technologies.
Dani recently defended her PhD, entitled ‘Making Responsibility Matter: The Emergence of Responsible Innovation as an Intellectual Movement’ – full text available here: http://doi.org/10.26481/dis.20221208ds