Technology Assessment

This subsection argues why we need technology assessment approach while framing the research and gives a brief information what the technology assessment is. Technical change derives from the inherent endeavor to modify the outside world to smooth out the risks of existence. By challenging nature with his crafts, man has progressively created a functional link between science, technology, and economy. This has led to rapid growth of ever complex technologies and societal systems where technology is geared to maximizing economic growth

and the average expectancy of material well-being. In short, the increased visibility of technology’s role in shaping society place TA as an approach of several fields in social science and humanities, management, and strategy.

In this context, TA considers its task as interdisciplinary approach to solving already existing problems or preventing potential damage caused by the uncritical application and the commercialization of new technologies. In other terms, TA is the systematic study of the impacts on society and the environment that occur when a technology is introduced, extended, or modified. The fundamental rationale of TA is that from now on various social groups other than the actual initiators and proponents of a technology are claiming the right to have their say in decisions concerning the future application and diffusion of a technology. If someone wants to have a common definition at all, TA is a scientific, interactive and communicative process which aims to contribute to the formation of public and political opinion on societal aspects of science and technology (TAMI, 2004). Because of the ever-increasing recognition on the importance of technological innovation on the economy and on society, TA is becoming more mainstream, more formalized and more embedded in institutions such as parliaments and firms (Smits, 1991).

The purpose of TA is to provide competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, political, and environmental impacts of technology. More specifically, the goal of TA is to anticipate these impacts, to identify the various stakeholders who may be affected by implementation of technology, and to analyze the effects of alternative policies. Common to all TA strands, it is the wish to reduce the potential negative consequences of new and emerging technologies and to optimize the uptake and socioeconomic impacts of new technologies (Rip, 2001).

The future of any leading-edge sector depends on decisions made decades earlier. In key technology areas such as energy, materials, design, transportation systems, infrastructure, and environmental protection, making correct and timely decisions is crucial. Most funding organizations, decision support and policy making require information on the potential consequences of the introduction of new technologies before they are widely implemented at early stages of their development when the direction of the innovation process already can be influenced but its implications can hardly be foreseen. The principle of considering the knowledge, presumed or probable technology impacts in decisions already at an early stage is part of the basic concept of TA. It was introduced as an early warning of technological risks and unintended consequences, later also a tool for an early diagnosis of the chances and potentials of the technology (Fleischer, 2004). As we defined above, TA is a scientific,

interactive, and communicative process with the aim to contribute to the public and political opinion forming on science and technology related societal aspects like exploitation of potential dealing with secondary effects, and technological risks, overcoming problems of legitimacy and technology conflicts. It produces knowledge, orientation, and procedures to deal with societal challenges in coping with technology (Fleischer, 2004).

An important problem concerning technology assessment is the so-called Collingridge dilemma: on the one hand, impacts of new technologies cannot be easily predicted until the technology is extensively developed and widely used; on the other hand, control or change of a technology is difficult as soon as it is widely used. And more in reality, there is little adaptation because the social consequences are difficult to clarify and impossible to attest objectivity and because practical and political involvements make it generally difficult to modify the course of action. This makes decision makers hesitant and ready to justify ongoing technological trends, rather than to challenge them. Consequently, most conventional assessments are neither objective nor value-neutral exercises but instead are greatly influenced and biased by the values of the most powerful stakeholders, which are in many cases the developers and proponents (i.e., corporations and governments) of new technologies under consideration.

Although the core effort of TA is analysis of impacts, especially high order or unforeseen ones, the scope of TA varies. Some studies are very broad, while others are quite specific.

Generally, TA may take any one of the following forms.

a) project assessment which focuses on the impacts of a project,

b) problem-oriented assessment which addresses means of solving some specific societal problem,

c) technology-oriented assessment which examines some new technology and analysis its impacts on society and the environment.

TAMI project final report (2004) tries to systematize different kinds of issues TA projects are addressing in three dimensions: Technology oriented like the questions to new developments in biotechnologies and in information and communication technologies etc.;

domain oriented like health, work, mobility etc.; and consequence oriented which will put the emphasis on societal trends or changes that are technology related like privacy, sustainable development, gender division etc. This typology is helpful to identify where the project starts from and what its initial perspective is. This influences the goal setting of the TA project and the project design.

TA does have a history and one can describe it in terms of generations of TA. The first generation of TA strands was policy-oriented emerging in the 1960’s in the U.S. with the advent of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) at the time U.S. Congress saw the need to have advanced warnings on the potential societal, economic, ethical, and political effects of new technologies in the U.S. and elsewhere. Thus, TA has its origins in providing useful intelligence for public policy. Around that period, TA was defined as the name for a class of policy studies which attempt to look at the widest possible scope of impacts in society of the introduction of a new technology. Its goal was to inform the policy process (Coates, 1976). However, at the end of the 1970s, American industry picked up the term of TA quite independently of the OTA definition, more in line with notions of technology readiness assessment. This industry used TA as a means of anticipating what was going on outside of their firm to see how it affected their own activities (as opposed to anticipating the effect of their technology developments on markets and society). Moreover, whilst in the U.S. the Congress dissolved OTA in 1995, policy-oriented TA was heterogeneously spreading across several public agencies in European countries with participatory traditions such as in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (Rip, 2001). A branch of such activities can be defined as parliamentary TA. TAMI report (2004) and most recently PACITA project (2011-2015) have been important European projects focusing efforts on sharing best practices and harmonizing parliamentary technology assessment, despite the vast heterogeneity.

The second generation of TA strands, emerging in the mid-1980s and early 1990’s, shows an uptake of TA by non-governmental institutions. In this wave, firms begun applying TA along the same lines as the original OTA thrust, as opposed to TA as technology readiness assessment.

Here, TA acts as a tool in supporting strategies up to and including agenda building (Rip, 2001).

During this time, TA became process oriented developing tools and methodologies targeted at shaping new technology developments in line with emerging demands. The variety of methods applied ranged from trend exploration and Delphi, through to interventions in innovation networks and consensus meetings (Van den Ende, 1998). It is no coincidence that this 2nd generation of TA coincided with the emergence of biotechnology, which began to raise societal concerns in the mid-80s well into the 90s and 2000s, especially with regards to genetically modified organisms. A pressure to anticipate on societal impacts became a pressing issue, which shaped motivations and approaches to TA. Shedding light on the blurry borders between the different TA strands, Rip (2001) offers a typology of TA including: “Public Service TA”,

“TA for public arena”, “TA to specific sectors”, “TA in firms and technological institutes” and

“Constructive Technology Assessment”.

Böhle and Moniz (2015), building on such a typology, characterize TA in terms of the different spheres in which those strands might fall: the “Policy sphere”, dealing with the

“political system”; the “Public sphere” referring to “civil society” and the “Science &

Technology sphere” dealing with the research and innovation system. Rip, Böhle and Moniz suggest that the applicable sphere to the cases or problems under analysis depends to whom TA addresses. It can be either decision-makers part of the policy system, civil society from the public sphere or firms and non-governmental bodies from the innovation system (Böhle, 2015).

Constructive TA (CTA) was developed in the Netherlands early 1980s, particularly through a dedicated program organized by the national nanotechnology initiative NanoNed (Rip, 2013), but also applied and discussed elsewhere, and attempts to broaden the design of new technology through feedback of TA activities into the actual construction of technology. Contrary to other forms of TA, CTA is not directed toward influencing regulatory practices by assessing the impacts of technology. Instead, CTA wants to address social issues around technology by influencing design practices. CTA focuses on the wider interaction of the broad range of actors (including society) that have a “stake” in the development, deployment, and use of new technology fields (Robinson, 2010). CTA has often focused on technology fields in their early stage of emergence, where uncertainty reigns and there is a need to both characterize potential future developments and to construct assessment approaches collectively to assess these new developments (Robinson, 2010).

Another important point is the question of how TA is done. Numerous authors and agencies have provided steps to be undertaken by an interdisciplinary assessment team. The overall similarity of their strategies is striking, and they typically define TA in terms of ten components.

The first step involves defining the scope and depth of the assessment and identifying the actors at interest to the technology, those likely to gain or lose because of impacts. The second step is a through description of the technology being evaluated. At the third step, the assessors attempt to anticipate the character and timing of changes in the technology and others related to it. The purpose is to reveal factors such as likely future cost savings, new applications of the technology, and possible future scientific breakthrough. At the fourth step, the assessment team attempts to describe those aspects of society likely to interact with the technology under consideration. Various social indicators and surveys are useful at this stage. Based on the social description, assessors next seek to represent the most plausible future configurations of society and to project possible changes in it. At the sixth step, with these projections in mind, the assessment team can accomplish identifying both direct and higher-order impacts of the proposed project or technology. At the seventh step, the interdisciplinary team studies the

likelihood and magnitude of various impacts identified during work on the previous assessment steps. Here expertise essential to disciplines plays a greater role. At the eighth step, the team use these analyses both to evaluate the impacts and to determine their significance relative to the technology and to societal goals. At the ninth step, the impacts are suitably evaluated, and the assessors compare options for implementing technological developments and for dealing with their consequences. Based on this analysis, explicit policy recommendations may or may not be made. Finally, the team determines ways in which the results of its study can be communicated to persons or groups most likely to benefit from it.

As a result, after these discussions, this thesis aimed to enlarge understanding of an emerging air transportation mode, eVTOL PATS, through with technology assessment point of view. TA approach provides opportunity to design the entire transportation system up-front, instead of having vehicles show-up ad-hoc with mismatched requirements, instead of forcing vehicles into existing infrastructure, instead of developers needing to believe “if we build it, they will come”.