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How Smart Grid Meets In Vitro Meat: on Visions as Socio-Epistemic Practices

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Abstract

The production, manipulation and exploitation of future visions are increasingly important elements in practices of visioneering socio-technical processes of innovation and transformation. This becomes obvious in new and emerging science and technologies and large-scale transformations of established socio-technical systems (e.g. the energy system). A variety of science and technology studies (STS) provide evidence on correlations between expectations and anticipatory practices with the dynamics of such processes of change. Technology assessment (TA) responded to the challenges posed by the influence of visions on the processes by elaborating methodologies for a “vision assessment” as a contribution to what is now increasingly known as “hermeneutical TA”. But until now, the practical functions of visions in the processes have not been explained in a way that satisfies the empirical needs of TA’s vision assessment—that is to provide future-oriented knowledge based on the analysis of ongoing changes in the present without knowing the future outcomes. Our leading hypothesis is that we can only understand the practical roles of visions in current processes if we analyse them as socio-epistemic practices which simultaneously produce new knowledge and enable new social arrangements. We elaborate this by means of two cases: the visions of In Vitro meat and of the smart grid. Here, we interpret visioneering more in its collective dimension as a contingent and open-ended process, emerging from heterogeneous socio-epistemic practices. This paper aims at improving TA’s vision assessments and related STS research on visionary practices for real-time analysis and assessments.

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Notes

  1. Grunwald’s concept of “technology futures” has nothing in common with prognoses about what the future of a technology will look like [10, 11]. We agree with this understanding of “technology futures”.

  2. These ideas were also elaborated in the project “Visions as socio-epistemic practices. Theoretical foundation and practical application of vision assessment in technology assessment” at ITAS, to which the two authors belong. See https://www.itas.kit.edu/english/projects_loes14_luv.php. Accessed 20 July 2016.

  3. See an extract of this media event here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = bkbLVamdUEY. Accessed 20 July 2016.

  4. The culturedbeef.net website went online in July 2013.

  5. See the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Y027yLT2QY0. Accessed 20 July 2016.

  6. The company Clara Foods is working on producing egg whites with synthetic biology methods avoiding the use of hens.

  7. Scientists in the field of In Vitro meat as well as in fundamental biology are working on an animal-free alternative to foetal calf serum, since animal compounds represent a health problem (it has been demonstrated that these serums can transmit diseases) and an epistemic one, rendering experiments less standardisable (it is often impossible to trace the origin of the calves from which the serum is extracted). For an ethical innovation such as In Vitro meat, the use of this serum represents a serious problem, since the procedure of obtaining it is painful for the calves [50]. Nevertheless, it is interesting, and also quite typical for an enthusiastic innovation narrative, that the positive effects of In Vitro meat on animal welfare are often stated without mentioning this problem.

  8. Sentience Politics, which is part of the Effective altruism charity based on the ideas of the philosopher Peter Singer, has recently written an open letter to the German Government asking for financial support for research on IVM (see https://sentience-politics.org/de/politik/kultiviertes-fleisch-deutschland/). Accessed 19 July 2016.

  9. Historically, the vision of a smart grid is not a result of national and international policy decisions on energy transitions. The smart grid vision emerged in the 1990s in engineering circles (cf. [60]). Many of the technological components under consideration were already in development before the German Parliament’s decision, but their implementation in the energy system is still largely a vision. Such smart grid visions, however, are not confined to Germany but are a global energy policy idea (e.g. in Denmarl and the USA) [61, 62].

  10. Yet, they shall be simulated and controlled with algorithms that keep the system in balance and energy available, e.g. by “intelligently” telling certain system elements to consume less energy if there is less available. From this perspective, the smart grid vision builds upon such ideas as networking, ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence and it envisions a thorough coupling of energy and information flows (see also [68]).

  11. By the mid-2000s, the vision had entered US and EU policies, and first smart grid research and experimentation projects were launched across the world. In the EU, more than 450 smart grid projects with different smart grid designs have been started since 2002, with a significant increase since 2009 [69, 70].

  12. The “E-Energy” project ran from 2007 to 2013 and was a federally funded R&D project involving industry, research and municipalities [58].

  13. See, for example, the huge variety of smart grid prototypes realised in the different regional pilot projects of “E-Energy” [58].

  14. These findings are mainly based on our expert interviews; see footnote 10.

  15. For reflections on the ambivalent relation between TA and visioneering, and on TA as a visioneering (assessment) actor, see [75].

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleague Christoph Schneider and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this text.

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  1. Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 3640, 76021, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Arianna Ferrari & Andreas Lösch

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Ferrari, A., Lösch, A. How Smart Grid Meets In Vitro Meat: on Visions as Socio-Epistemic Practices. Nanoethics 11, 75–91 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-017-0282-9

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