Kjetil Rommetveit

Imagining High-Tech Bodies: Science Fiction and the Ethics of Enhancement

Seeking for broad and inclusive ways of framing ethical debates on emerging technologies, in this article the authors explore imaginaries of body enhancement as encompassed in the science fiction (sci-fi) literature. They provide in-depth descriptions of three sci-fi novels: Neuromancer, The Player of Games, and Kéthani. They explore how ethical concerns are framed within the imaginary world of these novels, emphasizing that this framing is usually ambivalent, embedded within lived narratives, as well as future and collectively oriented. Because they evoke shared imaginaries, sci-fi novels appear as useful to trigger debate on new technologies.

The Technolife project: an experimental approach to new ethical frameworks for emerging science and technology

Science and technology evolve fast both as a result of their internal dynamics and the increased emphasis on research and innovation in the so-called knowledge economy. Due attention to ethical issues and aspects of emerging science and technology is called for. This paper presents the development of an experimental methodology for empirical and participatory ethics of science and technology designed to detect, understand and mediate public concerns. The experimental approach of Technolife seeks for points of mediation by which varied public concerns can become embedded institutionally and secure sets of legitimate procedures. It is an open (experimental) question if the wide variety of technologies now in sway can be handled within a uniform ethical framework or if such ethical frameworks also need to evolve more sensitised to diverse technological challenges. Thus, our methodological approach is experimental in yet a further manner in that we seek to mediate between lay ethics, whether actually existent or else merely potential, and the discourse of professional ethicists, recognising the fragmented character of both layers. The methodology forms a central part of the European Union FP7-supported, ongoing (2010) project Technolife, which gives social and sociotechnical imaginaries a key role in the ethical framework.

Tackling epistemological naivety: large-scale information systems and the complexities of the common good.

We have arrived at a situation in which policymakers and ethicists are considering abandoning informed consent in the governance of certain new technologies, many of which are related to large-scale information systems. A paradigm case is the problem with using individuals’ informed consent to regulate biobanks. As sometimes suggested, there is a need for “new ethical frameworks.”

Right engineering? The redesign of privacy and personal data protection

ABSTRACT The idea of building safeguards for privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms into ICT systems has recently been introduced in EU legislation as ‘Data Protection by Design’. This article studies the techno-epistemic network emerging around this idea historically and empirically. We present the findings of an ‘extended peer consultation’ with representatives of the emerging network: policy-makers, regulators, entrepreneurs and ICT developers, but also with jurists and publics that seem instead to remain outside its scope. Standardization exercises here emerge as crucial hybrid sites where the contributions and expectations of different actors are aligned to scale up privacy design beyond single technologies and organizations and to build highly interconnected ICT infrastructures. Through the notion of ‘privacy by network’, we study how the concept of privacy hereby becomes re-constituted as ‘normative transversal’, which both works as a stabilizing promise for responsible smart innovation, but simultaneously catalyzes the metamorphosis of the notion of privacy as elaborated in legal settings. The article identifies tensions and limits within these design-based approaches, which can in turn offer opportunities for learning lessons to increase the quality of privacy articulations.

Technoscience, imagined publics and public imaginations:

This essay begins from the intensified entanglements of technoscientific innovation with miscellaneous societal and public fields of interest and action over recent years. This has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the work of purification of discourses of natural and human agency, which Latour observed in 1993. Replacing such previous discursive purifications, we increasingly find technoscientific visions of the imagined-possible as key providers of public meanings and policies. This poses the question of what forms of legitimation are constituted by these sciences, including the ways in which they enter into articulations of public matters. Revisiting historical and contemporary theories of imagination and science, this essay proposes a joint focus on imagination, publics and technoscience and their mutual co-production over time. This focus is then directed towards recent reconfigurations of technosciences with their imagined publics and towards how public issues may become constituted by social actors as active imaginations-exercising agents.

Tragedy and Grenzsituationen in genetic prediction

Philosophical anthropologies that emphasise the role of the emotions can be used to expand existing notions of moral agency and learning in situations of great moral complexity. In this article we tell the story of one patient facing the tough decision of whether to be tested for Huntington’s disease or not. We then interpret her story from two different but compatible philosophical entry points: Aristotle’s conception of Greek tragedy and Karl Jaspers’ notion of Grenzsituationen (boundary situations). We continue by indicating some ways in which these two positions may be used for reflecting upon different perspectives involved in clinical decision-making, those of patients, clinicians and bioethicists. We conclude that the ideas we introduce can be used as hermeneutic tools for situating learning and dialogue within a broader cultural field in which literature and art may also play important roles.

The biometric imaginary: (Dis)trust in a policy vacuum:

The decision in Europe to implement biometric passports, visas and residence permits was made at the highest levels without much consultation, checks and balances. Council regulation came into force relatively unnoticed in January 2005, as part of wider securitization policies urging systems interoperability and data sharing across borders. This article examines the biometric imaginary that characterizes this European Union decision, dictated by executive powers in the policy vacuum after 9/11 – a depiction of mobility governance, technological necessity and whom/what to trust or distrust, calling upon phantom publics to justify decisions rather than test their grounding. We consult an online blog we operated in 2010 to unravel this imaginary years on. Drawing on Dewey’s problem of the public, we discuss this temporary opening of a public space in which the imaginary could be reframed and contested, and how such activities may shape, if at all, relations between politics, publics, policy intervention and societal development.

Data Protection by Design: Promises and Perils in Crossing the Rubicon Between Law and Engineering.

This article reports some main findings from a study of recent efforts towards building privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms into smart ICT systems. It mainly focuses on the concept of ‘Data Protection by Design and by Default’ (DPbD), recently introduced by EU legislation, and as implemented through the new field of privacy engineering. We describe the new constellations of actors that gather around this legislative and engineering initiative as an emerging ‘techno-epistemic network’. The article presents the empirical findings of a broad consultation with people involved in the making of this network, including policy makers, regulators, entrepreneurs, ICT developers, civil rights associations, and legal practitioners. Based on the findings from our consultations, we outline how DPbD is subject to differing, sometimes also conflicting or contradictory, expectations and requirements. We identify these as three main points of friction involved in the making of data protection by design: organisations versus autonomous data subjects; law versus engineering, and local versus global in the making of standards and infrastructures.

Digital Globes: Layers of Meaning and Technology, Redefining Geographies and Communities

This chapter aims to give an overview of some developments in digital maps and globes in the last decade, and some ways in which we, individually and collectively, experience and imagine ourselves, others and space through the use of digital maps and globes. We will focus on modes of imagination as ways of understanding collective experience, and overlaying as the technological and digital counterpart needed for constructing such experience. We also offer some examples of ways in which collective imagination is self-replicating and co-produced along with broad technological and social platforms, possibly also changing communities or generating new forms of community. Anything like a total overview is impossible, and so our selection is an eclectic one, in both diachronic and synchronic terms. The exposition is based in the work with one European research project, Technolife. During that project we have been reviewing academic as well as policy literature on GIS, and we have been carrying out a debate about the social and ethical aspects of GIS with a number of online participants (www.technolife.no). In an essayistic style we draw upon all these sources, including media and web content as well as arguments made by participants during the online debate. In order to introduce our argument, the first section will give a brief account of how, in time, geographical space has been codified into disciplines and political enterprises, thereby also feeding into different communities and world-views.

Introducing Biometrics in the European Union: Practice and Imagination

This article gives a critical overview of the policy process introducing biometrics in the European Union. It starts out by describing how existing biometrics practices, such as fingerprinting and access control, are now being transformed and expanded in order to improve security and efficiency in the governance of global mobility. Following strong US initiatives in 2001 and onwards, the governance of mobility has been attempted transformed through what I call the biometrics vision. In brief, this vision states that biometric information can serve to increase control of mobility by enhancing the capacity of government agencies for monitoring and exchanging information about individuals. I follow this vision as it arose in the US, travelled through international organisations and into the European Union, where it has been promoted at high political levels. I finish off by a critical examination of the biometrics vision, referring to James Scott’s concept of “seeing like a state”, but using it in the context of the European Union. It is argued that the biometrics vision overlooks a number of technological and social issues. Social and technical complexities and problems may take on increased relevance as vision is turned into practice.