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Potential vulnerabilities associated with emerging technologies: insights from a systematic literature review

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Abstract

Emerging technologies advance so rapidly that it is challenging to account for all of their positive and negative impacts. Discussion of vulnerabilities, the potential negative impacts, tends to be sidelined in favor of innovative transformations that such technologies have enabled in human lives. A holistic view of the impacts of emerging technologies is crucial for developers, policy makers, and technology users to improve design, evaluation, and policies to reduce threats and protect society. In this paper a systematic literature review has been conducted to identify various vulnerabilities that can be associated with emerging technologies, categorize the vulnerabilities, identify different types of each vulnerability and identify existing recommendations to mitigate them. Our analyses reveal that the potential vulnerabilities can be categorized into seven domains of technical, economical, health, ethical, legal/political, societal, and environmental vulnerabilities. In each category, vulnerabilities have been identified, examples and statistics of vulnerabilities have been explored, and protocols and suggested preventive actions have been identified. Our findings reveal that the most discussed categories of vulnerabilities are technical and ethical, and few protocols or preventative actions exist for reducing vulnerability in any of the categories. Considering both positive and negative impacts of emerging technologies is paramount in properly evaluating and regulating emerging technologies. This study sheds light in this direction by elaborating various vulnerabilities of emerging technologies.

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Data availability

All data and materials supporting this research including the excel sheet that was created to code the identified studies will be available upon request. Interested readers are encouraged to contact the second author (saman.asvadi@mail.concordia.ca).

Notes

  1. https://www.ebsco.com/user/login.

  2. Our search queries include: (“unintended consequences”) + (“digital”; “dark side” OR “dark sides”) + (“digital”; “vulnerability” OR “vulnerabilities”) + (“digital”; “ethical problem” OR “ethical problems”) + (“IT’; “negative”) + (“digital”; “problem”) + (“digital technology”; “unintended”) + (“technology”).

  3. https://shidler.hawaii.edu/itm/hicss.

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Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support received from the Mobilizing Insights in Defense and Security (MINDS) program of the Department of National Defense (DND), Canada. Any opinions and conclusions in this work are strictly those of the authors and do not reflect the views, positions, or policies of - and are not endorsed by - MINDS, DND, or the Government of Canada.

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  1. Department of Supply Chain and Business Technology Management, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Mohsen Farhadloo & Saman Asvadi

  2. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Kash Khorasani

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  1. Mohsen Farhadloo
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Contributions

Mohsen Farhadloo designed and conceptualized the study. The literature search, material preparation, and data collection were performed by Saman Asvadi. Mohsen Farhadloo and Saman Asvadi contributed to the analysis and synthesis of the results. Saman Asvadi and Mohsen Farhadloo drafted the work and Kash Khorasani critically revised the work.

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Correspondence to Mohsen Farhadloo.

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Farhadloo, M., Asvadi, S. & Khorasani, K. Potential vulnerabilities associated with emerging technologies: insights from a systematic literature review. Manag Rev Q (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00420-5

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