[SydPhil] HPS Research - Dr Nicole Vincent - FLOURISHING WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Tue Oct 8 12:00:31 AEDT 2019

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SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE
SYDNEY CENTRE FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE
PRESENTS
SEMESTER TWO 2019 RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES

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Dr Nicole Vincent
Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation
UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY

FLOURISHING WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Emerging technologies – e.g. autonomous vehicles, gene editing, blockchain, and smart drugs – promise an exciting future. Before this excitement can become a reality, though, important concerns about safety, effectiveness, and equity must first be addressed.  However, what's often overlooked in the midst of excitement about the promise of emerging technologies, is what Tsjalling Swierstra calls "soft impacts".  I will argue that by overlooking, ignoring, and even deriding concerns about potential soft impacts, we effectively relinquish control over how we shall live our lives to the invisible hand of competition fueled by morally undirected technological progress. Technologies shape the way we interact with one another, how we think of ourselves and others, and even what things we value. Thus, if we wish to have a say over such things – things which matter no less, though are admittedly harder to predict and evaluate, than the more-obvious "hard impacts" which we either explicitly aim to bring about, or can more easily foresee and attempt to avoid – then we will need to pay significantly more attention to soft impacts than we currently do. To live in a world we have chosen, rather than in whatever world we inadvertently create for ourselves, we need to contemplate the full range of consequences of emerging technologies, not only those that are easy to imagine, predict, and evaluate. In order to make this task easier, in the final part of this talk I will describe a method for doing precisely that — one which builds on an existing approach in medicine to identifying and safe-guarding against the unintended medical side-effects of medical procedures and technologies.
When: Monday 14th October 2019 From 5.30pm
Level 5 Function Room,
Administration Building (F23)
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