New Perspectives on Technology in Society ― Experimentation Beyond the Laboratory

The development and introduction of a new technology to society can be viewed as an experimental process, full of uncertainties, which are only gradually reduced as the technology is employed. Unexpected developments may trigger an experimental process in which society must find new ways to deal with the uncertainties posed.

This book explores how the experimental perspective determines what ethical issues new technologies raise and how it helps morally evaluate their introduction. Expert contributors highlight the uncertainties that accompany the process, identify the social and ethical challenges they give rise to, and propose strategies to manage them.

Focusing on the introduction of new technologies and experimentation as ways to perceive new developments and changing contexts, a key theme of the book is how to approach the moral issues raised by new technology and understand the role of experimentation in exploring these matters.

Lotte Asveld is an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology studying the societal aspects of biotechnology. Her main research interests concern responsible innovation in the field of biotechnology and synthetic biology: how can the societal debate on biotechnology and synthetic biology be integrated in innovation trajectories? Lotte has worked as a researcher in the department of Philosophy at DUT, where she also received her PhD. Her PhD concerned societal decision making on technological risks. Lotte also worked as a researcher at the Rathenau Institute, focusing on the bioeconomy, and as a freelance researcher in China.

Donna C. Mehos is an independent scholar who has studied historical and sociological aspects of science and technology. In her earlier work, she examined nineteenth-century science in European cultural life and technological expertise in the colonial and post-colonial world including the technopolitics of the Cold War. Her recent work explores current infrastructure development including decentralization of infrastructure networks, social acceptability and policy implications of wind energy, and the future of gas in energy infrastructures.

Ibo van de Poel is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor in Ethics and Technology and head of the Department of Values, Technology & Innovation at the Faculty Technology, Policy and Management at the Technical University Delft in the Netherlands. He has published on engineering ethics, the moral acceptability of technological risks, design for values, responsible innovation, moral responsibility in research networks, ethics of new emerging technologies, and the idea of new technology as social experiment.