Making Policies about Emerging Technologies

Speculating About Robot Moral Standing: On the Constitution of Social Robots as Objects of Governance

In recent years, the governance of robotic technologies has become an important topic in policy-making contexts. The many potential applications and roles of robots in combination with steady advances in their uptake within society are expected to cause various unprecedented issues, which in many cases will increase the demand for new policy measures. One of the major issues is the way in which societies will address potential changes in the moral and legal status of autonomous social robots. Robot standing is an important concept that aims to understand and elaborate on such changes in robots’ status. This paper explores the concept of robot standing as a useful idea that can assist in the anticipatory governance of social robots. However, at the same time, the concept necessarily involves forms of speculative thinking, as it is anticipating a future that has not yet fully arrived. This paper elaborates on how such speculative engagement with the potential of technology represents an important point of discussion in the critical study of technology more generally. The paper then situates social robotics in the context of anticipatory technology governance by emphasizing the idea that robots are currently in the process of becoming constituted as objects of governance. Subsequently, it explains how specifically a speculative concept like robot standing can be of value in this process.

Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Governance of Synthetic Biology

For many innovations, oversight fits nicely within existing governance mechanisms; nevertheless, others pose unique public health, environmental, and ethical challenges. Synthetic artemisinin, for example, has many precursors in laboratory-developed drugs that emulate natural forms of the same drug. The policy challenges posed by synthetic artemisinin do not differ significantly in kind from other laboratory-formulated drugs. Synthetic biofuels and gene drives, however, fit less clearly into existing governance structures. How many of the new categories of products require new forms of regulatory oversight, or at least extensive forms of testing, remains unclear. Any effort to improve the governance of synthetic biology should start with a rich understanding of the different possible science-policy interfaces that could help to inform governance. CBA falls into a subset of the overall range of possibilities, and which interface is appropriate may turn out to depend on context, on the demands of the decision at hand. In what follows, we lay out a typology of interfaces. After that, we turn to the question of how to draw upon the range of possible interfaces and effectively address the factual and moral complexities of emerging technologies. We propose a governance model built around structures that we call "governance coordinating committees." GCCs are intended to be mechanisms for accommodating the complexities of innovations that have far-ranging societal impacts. The production of biofuels, for example, could contaminate water supplies and have a destructive environmental impact if not managed correctly. The introduction of a gene drive could have economic and environmental impacts that are not restricted to one nation. Forging appropriate means for determining and evaluating those societal impacts, to the best of a corporation's, industry's, or government's ability, is central to responsible research and innovation. Public policy must be shaped in a manner that accommodates as many concerns as possible and minimizes risks.