Abstract
New technologies change the world irreversibly. These changes do not necessarily need to be only positive. Herbicides and insecticides raised agricultural yields but turned out to accumulate in food chains and therefore threatened wildlife. Chlorofluorocarbons made refrigerators much safer but turned out to deplete the ozone layer that protects life from solar UV radiation. These technologies created catastrophic side effects.A different category of effects is much harder to assess: the effects that are not directly caused by a new technology itself, but by the changes in human behavior that it provokes. Cars did not just replace horses and carriages, but created a new freedom of movement. One of the effects of this new freedom was commuting. Another was the transfer of downtown shopping areas to outskirt shopping malls. These impacts dramatically changed cities and the nearby countryside. Generally, these indirect effects are hardly foreseen.It is important to assess and discuss the impacts of a new technology in an early stage of its development: Then, the technologies might still be adapted. Technology Assessment aims at assessing the impacts of new technologies. However, impacts of new technology can hardly be assessed in a neutral and factual way: Assessing all effects is generally impossible but choosing a focus of impact is a political choice. Moreover, by which standards should effects be evaluated? Sometimes, new technologies create new issues for which society has no widely accepted ethical standards. Therefore, not only impacts should be assessed but also new normative standards should be developed. The involvement of stakeholders in this process is crucial. Genetic modification introduced the issue of manipulation of life; nuclear reactors introduced the issue of global scale accidents and the Internet confronted society with loss of privacy and cyber-crime. Reaching consensus on these issues takes debate, as without debate, nobody will consider the issue and no consensus will ever emerge. The question is how to make these debates effective, that is, not unnecessarily hampering the required sustainable innovations and not ending in large-scale controversy. Such debates need input and careful design (not manipulation).This chapter will elaborate on these arguments, and deal with tools that can be helpful in assessing impacts of new technology.
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Mulder, K.F. (2013). Impact of New Technologies: How to Assess the Intended and Unintended Effects of New Technologies?. In: Kauffman, J., Lee, KM. (eds) Handbook of Sustainable Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8939-8_35
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