Emerging technologies as the next pandemic?
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SHORT COMMUNICATION
Emerging technologies as the next pandemic? Possible consequences of the Covid crisis for the future of responsible research and innovation Bernd Carsten Stahl1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Digital technology plays a key role during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is used to hunt for vaccination and treatment; it helps us collect and represent the data to understand the progress of the disease and it contributes to tracking and tracing infections. While these uses are generally well intentioned, they are also potentially problematic and call for external scrutiny and critique. In particular the Covid tracing apps are currently hotly debated and their technical, security or privacy implications raise significant amounts of concern (Morley et al. 2020). These are topics and questions that call for social and ethical reflection as described in the articles of this special issue. In this short research statement, I would like to shed light on a different possible consequence of the pandemic. I will ask whether the pandemic may pave the way towards a different and possibly more radical way of governing emerging digital technologies in democratic societies. I will use the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI) to explore this question. RRI is a term of high relevance in science, research and innovation governance. Introduced into the debate about a decade ago (von Schomberg 2011), it has been defined as the "on-going process of aligning research and innovation to the values, needs and expectations of society" (Rome Declaration 2014). There are different flavours of RRI (Owen and Pansera 2019), including the European Commission’s (2013) one that consists of six pillars or keys (engagement, gender equality, science education, ethics, open access and governance) and the one adopted by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Owen 2014), represented by the AREA acronym (anticipate, reflect, engage and act) which is based on Stilgoe et al. (2013).
RRI has been prominent in a number of different national research funding streams. The probably biggest funder of RRI-related work is the European Commission that invested heavily into RRI in its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme under the heading of science with and for society. As a result of these funding opportunities, much research has been undertaken to better understand existing responsibilities and to develop conceptual frameworks and empirical insights. One of its successes has been to bring together a range of established discourses covering different aspects of research, science and innovation governance under one shared umbrella. These discourses include, for example, technology ethics, philosophy of technology, computer and information ethics, value-sensitive technology assessment, science and technology studies and others. While RRI has thus been influential in shaping the way reflexivity is integrated in science, research and innovation, it is yet to be determined whether it was successful in fulfilling the grand visi
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