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Perspectives
Nanotechnology Under Democratic Control? I have been both impressed and troubled by the flurry of activity from philosophers and social scientists regarding nanotechnology, of which this year’s premier event was the Nano Ethics conference hosted by the University of South Carolina.
Good news first. Almost a hundred researchers and other interested observers gathered in Columbia, SC, in March 2005, to hear several dozen lectures reporting empirical research and scholarly reflection. Attendees came primarily from universities, but also from the Canadian Department of Justice, the ETC Group, the German Parliament’s technology assessment office, the Foresight Institute, and even a nanotechnology venture capital firm. Roughly a third of the attendees were from overseas, including contingents from the Japanese nanotechnology program, Delft, Lund, Lancaster, Basel, and the Danish Centre of Bioethics and Risk Assessment.
Some of the conference lectures were outstanding, including that given by ASU Law School professor Gary Marchant, who is trying to help develop international governance arrangements for nanotechnology by analyzing the world’s experience with the Montreal ozone protocol, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and other governance arrangements. Marchant was able to enumerate a considerable diversity of efforts, and I left with the impression that there are enough partial successes already in existence that humanity just might muddle toward international governance of nanotechnologies.
Another talk I found illuminating was that by Northeastern University political scientists Ronald Sandler and W. D. Kay, who argued that the widespread tendency to draw analogies for nanotechnology from the GMO case may be misleading. They pointed to the fact that agribusiness is highly concentrated and easy to protest against, whereas nanotechnology will be distributed among many different industries; nor will nanotech likely offend deep cultural values among the western European public as did the perceived GMO threat to traditional foods. I also appreciated Mark Gubrud’s appeal to pay more attention to military aspects of nanotechnology, and law professor Robin Fretwell Wilson’s analysis of terrorism insurance (both from University of Maryland). Perhaps the best empirical materials were those from ongoing studies of public attitudes and nanotechnology coverage in the media by Rick Stephens (South Carolina) and by Jason Gorss/Bruce Lewenstein (Cornell), documenting the pattern one might expect of generally upbeat stories combined with low public knowledge and high acceptance.
These and other fine papers notwithstanding, my overall reaction to the conference was much less favorable because, on the whole, I did not see social science scholars t offering the kinds of perspectives I believe the world needs from us. For example, I heard no conference presenters frame their analysis in light of the past generation’s scholarship on governance of technological innovation. Cumulatively improving knowledge is precious, and I hate to see us squander the opportunity to build on what we already know and use previously hard-won understanding to illuminate contemporary prospects and problems. Nor did most papers at the “Ethics” conference deploy normative frameworks that would allow discrepancies between desired and actual processes or outcomes to be systematically revealed and analyzed. In particular, the fact that a tiny fraction of humanity is making fateful decisions for all the rest appeared to be taken for granted rather than treated as a problem deserving challenge.
Six months later, I remain perplexed by the noncumulative and relatively uncritical commentary, both at the conference and more generally in the burgeoning domain of scholarship on social aspects of nanotechnoscience. Without suggesting that there is any one best way to approach such research, let me give an example of one tack that might serve the kinds of goals I would think that most in the field would advocate.
AN INDEX OF TECHNOLOGY UNDER DEMOCRATIC CONTROL (Maximum score = 100; each variable scored on a zero to five scale)
c. Funds to ease resistance to error correction (e.g., victims compensation)? (0) d. Strong incentives for error correction? (1)
How close does contemporary nanotechnology decision making come to fulfilling the above ideals? My own assessments are given in parentheses above, adding up to a ranking well below 20 percent. But no one person’s perspective deserves much weight, and I consider the index as it stands to be crude and incomplete. I intend this version of the index merely as a stimulus to others to do their own scoring, to come up with better criteria for assessing the quality of decision making, and otherwise to facilitate deeper probing regarding how to govern nanotechnological R&D and commercialization more wisely and more fairly.
Toward that end, let me share some of the reasoning behind my rankings. Starting with one of the better facets of contemporary nano decision making, the USC conference itself as well as the NSF’s impending announcement of two newly funded nanotechnology-in-society centers, illustrate the fact that nanotechnoscience is getting earlier study than other epochal technologies that typically slip into widespread use without much analysis of social consequences. While appreciating the improvement, one still needs to recognize that inquiry and deliberation should have geared up a decade earlier than it did -- if the goal was to influentially help shape nano trajectories as opposed to investigating and commenting on them. So I have assigned a score of three out of five on criterion #1a.
Nanotechnoscience also deserves a moderately high score for built-in flexibility (#3d), because myriad small activities are a lot easier to change than behemoth civilian nuclear reactors, if trial-and-error learning suggests the desirability of marked modification. The favorable flexibility profile is due more to the nature of the nano endeavor than to anyone’s conscious choice, of course, and it is easy to imagine additional ways of deliberately enhancing flexibility that are not being undertaken. For example, rather than creating dedicated research centers with special new infrastructure that builds momentum of both an institutional and a careerist sort, there might have been modest refurbishing of existing laboratories.
These two critieria -- flexibility and timeliness of deliberation -- are the only two variables on which nano decision making to date deserves a decent score, as far as I can now think through the matter. Other observers no doubt will see things I have missed or will interpret the evidence differently, however, and one of the places I would most welcome such probing is on the set of variables (#5) that I have labeled “appropriate expertise.” I may be underestimating the extent to which the nanotechnoscientific communities are considering the broader public implications of their work, for it certainly is true that a few scientists blew the whistle on nanoparticle threats, and it is likewise true that a large cadre of PhD nanotechnoscientists do not (yet?) work directly for industry, military, or government. Hence, one could argue that there is room for the conduct of public-regarding research, and room for disagreement among the scientific experts. Moreover, ETC, Greenpeace, Meridien, and SwissRe staffers certainly amplify the voices of dissenting university technoscientists. Nevertheless, I do not see how one can get around the fact that the main decision makers outside the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) itself are university nanotechnoscientists, and that many of them are caught in a conflict of interest given their dependence on nano funding. Is it fair to say that they tend to operate as de facto advocates for the NNI? So it seems to me. Moreover, incentives and dispositions toward “scientific progress” aside, few nanotechnological experts are prepared to contribute thoughtfully to public discourse concerning the social consequences of innovation. I recognize that it is impolite to say such things, but how can humanity appraise what is going on if social scientists and philosophers shrink from plain speaking on these matters?
Next, consider the third category on the index, that concerning how prudently decision making is proceeding in terms of coping with unknowns. Whereas early recombinant DNA proceeded in containment laboratories, nanoparticles were washed down the drain. Whereas early nuclear reactors were sited far from civilian populations, nanosensors are explicitly envisioned as widely distributed. Whereas very gradual scale-up is the essence of slow human and organizational learning, rapid spread of nanotechniques is the explicit and highly funded goal of those with most authority in the domain. To me, this adds up to a prima facie case of failing to deploy strategies for erring on the side of caution, i.e., imprudence.
Following directly from the above is the issue of whether influential participants in the nano arena are investigating, discussing, and negotiating a maximum feasible diversity of concerns (#1b). Military technologies generally are under-studied by scholars of science, technology, and society, and critical scrutiny of military R&D is rare in public discourse and in legislative hearings and debates. Likewise pretty much off the table is the breakneck pace of nano R&D, with hardly anyone in authority taking seriously the ETC Group’s call for a partial moratorium, much less extending that call into a fuller inquiry regarding what an appropriate pace of innovation would be for a set of epochal technologies.
The debate also has been narrow in terms of systematically looking at who stands to benefit. The Meridien Institute has attempted to bring the world’s poor to the nanotechnology table, but they are going against powerful structural conditions. For it takes resources to make good use of emerging technical potentials, and those resources almost always are held disproportionately by the affluent and powerful. Even moving an issue high on political-economic agendas normally requires good organization, ample resources, and active support from those with clout, precisely the conditions the world’s poor and their advocates typically lack.
Finally, as implied earlier, the conflict-of-interest problem itself is getting nothing like the debate it deserves because of a vicious circle: it is difficult to mount a serious public discussion because there are so few scientific experts available to play the role of devil’s advocate. Whether the social scientists and philosophers now obtaining funding to study nanotechnology-in-society will be able to change that remains to be seen. Bringing more analytic attention to a matter often has that effect, but the social analysts face a conflict-of-interest problem of their own: to get the grant money, they may temper their criticisms; and those who interview or collaborate with nanotechnoscientists likewise may restrict their inquiries to the relatively safe issues.
Regarding participation in decision making, it seems fair to say that nano is proceeding much like other realms of innovation: A small subset of humanity makes most of the choices that set the trajectory, minor corrections are made after a few critics belatedly complain about some of the worst facets, business executives use their discretion selectively to commercialize the emerging potentials, and customers then purchase (or not) those products and services. That this is a questionable method of making civilization-impacting choices has been argued by a number of scholars, but no more than very small dents have been made in conventional thinking or practice. Given that every social scientist knows that demographic background, occupational position, and related roles substantially shape people’s ideas, it is curious that more social analysts are not challenging the basic practices that allow highly educated, young and middle-aged males of the dominant ethnic groups in a handful of nations to be the driving force behind most kinds of technological innovation. Genuinely representative sharing of real influence over nanotechnoscience was not a clarion call I heard in South Carolina.
Those are some of the reasons I rank nanotechnological decision making relatively poorly in terms of the criteria in the index of Technology Under Democratic Control. I readily acknowledge that major technologies of the past century might have scored even lower, that other scholars’ interpretations will differ from mine, and that the index itself needs substantial improvement. Nevertheless, I believe the fundamental situation is clear enough to say that contemporary nanotechnoscientific decision making is nowhere close to what humanity ought to be aspiring to achieve. I would welcome hearing a lot more about that at upcoming conferences, together with explicit discussion of how social scientists and humanists studying nanotechnology can help catalyze wiser and fairer development and diffusion of the emerging technological potentials. If we do not strive to hone our understandings of how expertise should be arranged in a “good society,” of what it takes to proceed prudently, and of what fair representation actually would look like, how can we help the rest of humanity evaluate and modify contemporary practice?
Edward Woodhouse is a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The views
expressed here are those of the author. |
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