Risk and Soft Impacts

Abstract

Policy and technology actors seem to focus ''naturally'' on risk rather than on technology's social and ethical impacts that typically constitute an important focus of concern for philosophers of technology, as well as for the broader public. There is nothing natural about this bias. It is the result of the way discourses on technology and policy are structured in technological, liberal, pluralistic societies. Risks qualify as ''hard' ' (i.e., objective, rational, neutral, factual), other impacts as ''soft' ' (i.e., subjective, emotional, partisan, valueladen) and are therefore dismissable. To help redress this bias, it is necessary to understand how this distinction between hard and soft impacts is construed -in practice and in theory. How are expected (desired, feared) impacts of technology played out in expert-citizen/consumer interactions? We first discuss online patient deliberations on a future pill for celiac disease (''gluten intolerance'') promising to replace patients' lifelong diet. By ''rejecting'' this pill, patients displayed concerns about how the new technology would affect their identity, and the values incorporated in the way they had learned to handle their disease. Secondly, we analyze how experts construct a consumers' concern with ''naturalness'' of food: as a private -and invalid -preference that requires no further debate. The point of the analysis is to make available for discussion and reflection currently dominant ways to demarcate public and private issues in relation to emerging technologies, including the accompanying distributions of tasks and responsibilities over experts and laypersons. However, the actors themselves cannot simply alter these demarcations and distributions at will. Their manoeuvring room is co-shaped by discursive structures at work in modern, technological, pluralist, liberal societies. In the third section, we therefore identify these structures, as they provide the hegemonic answers to the three key questions with regard to the possible impacts of emerging technologies: how are impacts evaluated; how are they estimated; and how are they caused? We conclude with some suggestions for further research.

The Paradox of E-Numbers: Ethical, Aesthetic, and Cultural Concerns in the Dutch Discourse on Food Additives

“…Especially concerns about impacts that are not easily quantified and are not perceived as cases of direct harm, tend to be marginalized from the public debate (Swierstra and Te Molder 2012). A recent Dutch debate on food additives and ready meals offers some examples of such concerns.…”

Beyond checklists: toward an ethical-constructive technology assessment

“…This focus on subject constitution in practices of using technologies adds a significant dimension to a focus on policy-making (van der Burg 2009;Boenink, Swierstra, and Stemerding 2010;Swierstra and te Molder 2012) and to the current focus on design in mediation theory (Albrechtslund 2007;Verbeek 2013).…”

“…Typically, they are either viewed as irrelevant or as a private issue (Swierstra and te Molder 2012). Part of the reason for this myopia is that they are more difficult to predict than 'hard' impacts.…”

“…The moral implications of innovation -that is to say, how the introduction of new technologies affects relations, identities, norms and values -are sometimes referred to as 'soft impacts' (van der Burg 2009;Swierstra, Boenink, and Stemerding 2009;Swierstra and te Molder 2012). Although denoting phenomena that often are far from soft in the sense of being easily moldable -norms change slowly and rarely from a deliberate effort to change them -the concept of soft impacts has proven valuable in identifying and emphasizing issues other than those more closely associated with the functional aspects of the technologies.…”

“How do you know?”: everyday negotiations of expert authority

“…CA's general disinterest in the prioritisation of utterances in terms of importance is particularly helpful to study negotiations of expertise. Such negotiations, after all, typically evolve around the very question which claims to expertise and which concerns should or should not be taken into account (te Molder, 2012;Swierstra & te Molder, 2012). Because of its refusal to distinguish between talk and the real discussion, a CA approach regards it as meaningful when, for instance, participants on an anti-vaccination forum refer to science, regardless of the truth value of such statements.…”