Co-shaping the Life Story of a Technology: From Technological Ancestry to Visions of the Future

Abstract

The timing of any ethics on the laboratory floor poses a challenge, which has been famously described by Collingridge’s dilemma of control. This dilemma claims, on the one hand, that it is hard to control a technology once it has finished developing because at that point too many parties—researchers, producers, investors—have an interest in putting it on the market. Anyone who wants to prevent this from happening, who wants to impose restrictions on its use or change the technology itself, will have to come with heavily weighed arguments—concerning life and death—in order to reach her/his goal. Any attempt to control technologies at an earlier stage of development, however, does not have a chance of being successful either. According to the second horn of Collingridge’s dilemma, efforts to govern technology during research or development cannot be productive because at that stage it is still uncertain whether these technologies will be realised at all. It is therefore unclear what could be problematic about them and difficult to determine how they need to be governed (Collingridge 1980).