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Facing the Ethical Challenges of Technology: Why Should Scientists Not Be Alone in Judging Technology Impacts?
As technology continues to advance, scientists often face significant ethical challenges when assessing the impact of new technologies. This situation particularly highlights the importance of technology assessment (TA). Technology assessment is a method of studying new technologies and their possible social, economic, legal and ethical impacts. Although scientists have in-depth knowledge in their own professional fields, when it comes to decisions that affect society as a whole, their judgment alone is obviously not comprehensive and objective enough.
Technology assessment is not just an analysis of specific technologies, it is also a type of policy research that examines the short-term and long-term consequences of technology application.
In the 1960s, the United States first introduced technology assessment, focusing on issues such as supersonic transportation, environmental pollution, and the ethics of genetic screening. This shows that there are profound social impacts behind the development of science and technology, and relying solely on scientists’ own assessments may not fully understand potential risks and challenges. Scientists often lack ethical training and may not be able to objectively evaluate their own research results. Therefore, the impact of any new technology should be comprehensively analyzed from multiple perspectives based on the opinions of all parties.
The Science and Technology Assessment Process recognizes that scientists are generally not ethicists and should therefore be cautious in making ethical judgments about their new discoveries.
Technology assessment can be divided into various forms, such as expert assessment and participatory assessment. The expert assessment is led by a team of technical experts and incorporates the views of stakeholders through written opinions and interviews; while the participatory assessment encourages the participation of the public and people from all walks of life to seek diverse opinions and insights. This shows that policymakers need to include the voices of all parties as much as possible when formulating policies to obtain a more comprehensive understanding.
Participatory evaluation shows that decision-makers need to have diverse thinking to make reasonable decisions.
However, the development of science is often accompanied by unpredictable consequences. In the early stages of developing a new technology, its impact remains difficult to predict, and once the technology is widely adopted, it becomes even more difficult to change or control its development. This is the famous "Collinridge Dilemma." In this context, anticipating the ethical implications of these technologies becomes critical. Whether it is the anticipation of "technological ethical scenarios" or the ethical supervision of "social technological experiments", these are important tools for facing future challenges.
Technology assessment is not only an evaluation of the impact of technology, it is also a prediction mechanism to help decision-makers better understand upcoming technological changes.
It is undeniable that technology assessment faces challenges in terms of objectivity. These assessments are often constrained by the values of dominant stakeholders, especially those who develop and promote the technology. Such a bias may affect the direction of policy decisions and even lead to potential risks in the process of technological development. Therefore, it is particularly important to ensure fair and transparent assessments from multiple parties.
In addition to ethical challenges, the scope of technology assessment is also extremely broad, covering information technology, hydrogen technology, nuclear technology, artificial intelligence and other fields. Science and technology assessment agencies in various countries, such as the British Parliamentary Science and Technology Office and the German Science and Technology Assessment Office, provide support for policy formulation through various forms of science and technology assessment. They all emphasized open communication and interaction between political decision-makers to ensure transparency and acceptability of technological developments.
The most fundamental issue in technology assessment is how to maintain objectivity during the assessment process and prevent the values of dominant stakeholders from affecting the assessment results.
In today's era of rapid technological development, it is particularly important to incorporate the ethical and social significance of scientific and technological research into the evaluation process. Scientists should not judge the impact of technology alone, but should participate in discussions with society, ethics scholars and people from all walks of life. Only in this way can risks and potential humanitarian crises be reduced in technological development and the overall interests of society be achieved.
So, how can we better integrate ethical considerations and social values in the process of scientific and technological progress?
