Converging Technologies, Shifting Boundaries

No abstrac

Risk and Soft Impacts

Policy and technology actors seem to focus “naturally” on risk rather than on technology’s social and ethical impacts that typically constitute an important focus of concern for philosophers of technology, as well as for the broader public. There is nothing natural about this bias. It is the result of the way discourses on technology and policy are structured in technological, liberal, pluralistic societies. Risks qualify as “hard” (i.e., objective, rational, neutral, factual), other impacts as “soft” (i.e., subjective, emotional, partisan, value-laden) and are therefore dismissable. To help redress this bias, it is necessary to understand how this distinction between hard and soft impacts is construed – in practice and in theory. How are expected (desired, feared) impacts of technology played out in expert-citizen/consumer interactions? we first discuss online patient deliberations on a future pill for celiac disease (“gluten intolerance”) promising to replace patients’ lifelong diet. By “rejecting” this pill, patients displayed concerns about how the new technology would affect their identity, and the values incorporated in the way they had learned to handle their disease. Secondly, we analyze how experts construct a consumers’ concern with “naturalness” of food: as a private – and invalid – preference that requires no further debate. The point of the analysis is to make available for discussion and reflection currently dominant ways to demarcate public and private issues in relation to emerging technologies, including the accompanying distributions of tasks and responsibilities over experts and laypersons. However, the actors themselves cannot simply alter these demarcations and distributions at will. Their manoeuvring room is co-shaped by discursive structures at work in modern, technological, pluralist, liberal societies. In the third section, we therefore identify these structures, as they provide the hegemonic answers to the three key questions with regard to the possible impacts of emerging technologies: how are impacts evaluated; how are they estimated; and how are they caused? we conclude with some suggestions for further research

Natural Food: Organizing ‘Responsiveness’ in Responsible Innovation of Food Technology

Responsible innovation requires mutual responsiveness between various stakeholders around technological innovation. But in public engagement exercises, concerns about ethical, cultural and political impacts are too easily set aside, so that no one is actually encouraged to discuss responsibilities for these impacts. A typical example in the field of food innovation is the consumer’s recurring concern for natural food. In discussions, both consumers and engineers tend to consider the meaning of naturalness as subjective and private. In this chapter, we present an interdisciplinary design tool for public engagement that is more hospitable to such concerns, based on the Discursive Action Method and Techno-Ethical Imagination. We describe the advancements we made and the obstacles we faced when applying this tool in two dialogue workshops on novel foods and naturalnes

Natural Food: Organizing ‘responsiveness’ in responsible innovation of food technology

Responsible innovation requires mutual responsiveness between various stakeholders around technological innovation. But in public engagement exercises, concerns about ethical, cultural and political impacts are too easily set aside, so that no one is actually encouraged to discuss responsibilities for these impacts. A typical example in the field of food innovation is the consumer’s recurring concern for natural food. In discussions, both consumers and engineers tend to consider the meaning of naturalness as subjective and private. In this chapter, we present an interdisciplinary design tool for public engagement that is more hospitable to such concerns, based on the Discursive Action Method and Techno- Ethical Imagination. We describe the advancements we made and the obstacles we faced when applying this tool in two dialogue workshops on novel foods and naturalness

Natural Food. Organizing 'Responsiveness' in Responsible Innovation of Food Technology

Responsible innovation requires mutual responsiveness between various stakeholders around technological innovation. But in public engagement exercises, concerns about ethical, cultural and political impacts are too easily set aside, so that no one is actually encouraged to discuss responsibilities for these impacts. A typical example in the field of food innovation is the consumer’s recurring concern for natural food. In discussions, both consumers and engineers tend to consider the meaning of naturalness as subjective and private. In this chapter, we present an interdisciplinary design tool for public engagement that is more hospitable to such concerns, based on the discursive action method and techno-ethical imagination. We describe the advancements we made and the obstacles we faced when applying this tool in two dialogue workshops on novel foods and naturalness.keywordsresponsivenessfood technologynaturalnesssoft concernsstakeholder dialogueconversation analysistechno-ethical imagination

Risk and Soft Impacts

Policy and technology actors seem to focus “naturally” on risk rather than on technology’s social and ethical impacts that typically constitute an important focus of concern for philosophers of technology, as well as for the broader public. There is nothing natural about this bias. It is the result of the way discourses on technology and policy are structured in technological, liberal, pluralistic societies. Risks qualify as “hard” (i.e., objective, rational, neutral, factual), other impacts as “soft” (i.e., subjective, emotional, partisan, value-laden) and are therefore dismissable. To help redress this bias, it is necessary to understand how this distinction between hard and soft impacts is construed – in practice and in theory. How are expected (desired, feared) impacts of technology played out in expert-citizen/consumer interactions? we first discuss online patient deliberations on a future pill for celiac disease (“gluten intolerance”) promising to replace patients’ lifelong diet. By “rejecting” this pill, patients displayed concerns about how the new technology would affect their identity, and the values incorporated in the way they had learned to handle their disease. Secondly, we analyze how experts construct a consumers’ concern with “naturalness” of food: as a private – and invalid – preference that requires no further debate. The point of the analysis is to make available for discussion and reflection currently dominant ways to demarcate public and private issues in relation to emerging technologies, including the accompanying distributions of tasks and responsibilities over experts and laypersons. However, the actors themselves cannot simply alter these demarcations and distributions at will. Their manoeuvring room is co-shaped by discursive structures at work in modern, technological, pluralist, liberal societies. In the third section, we therefore identify these structures, as they provide the hegemonic answers to the three key questions with regard to the possible impacts of emerging technologies: how are impacts evaluated; how are they estimated; and how are they caused? we conclude with some suggestions for further research

Competing Agendas in Upstream Engagement Meetings Between Celiac Disease Experts and Patients

This article examines discussions between innovators and patient users about emergent medical technologies in the field of celiac disease. Using discursive psychology and conversation analysis, the authors analyze participants’ talk with regard to the social activities performed. They find that the topical agenda, preference structure, and presuppositions incorporated in the innovators’ questions restrict patients’ scope for saying things in and on their own terms. Not participants’ intentions per se but what the questions indirectly communicate profoundly shapes the agenda of these meetings. This may explain why some of the difficulties of innovator-user interaction are persistent and hard to pinpoint