Technology in the Age of Innovation: Responsible Innovation as a New Subdomain Within the Philosophy of Technology

von Schomberg, L., Blok, V. 

Philos. Technol. 34, 309–323 (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00386-3

Abstract

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI.

The Conclusion

Hence, even though RI provides a critical analysis of innovation at the ontic level (i.e., concerning the introduction and usage of particular innovations), it still lacks a critical analysis at the ontological level (i.e., concerning the techno-economic paradigm of innovation). Therefore, RI is in need of a fundamental reflection that not only exposes the techno-economic paradigm of innovation—which we did in this paper—but that also explores an alternative concept of innovation which addresses the public good beyond the current privatization wave. The political origins of innovation that we encountered in Section 2, along with the political ends that the RI literature explicitly prioritizes, suggest that we should inquire into a political orientation of innovation. A crucial task of this inquiry would be to account for what such a political orientation of innovation precisely entails at the ontic level, and how it relates to the current techno-economic paradigm of innovation at the ontological level.

The info is here.

Making better decisions in groups

Dan Bang, Chris D. Frith
Published 16 August 2017.
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170193

Abstract

We review the literature to identify common problems of decision-making in individuals and groups. We are guided by a Bayesian framework to explain the interplay between past experience and new evidence, and the problem of exploring the space of hypotheses about all the possible states that the world could be in and all the possible actions that one could take. There are strong biases, hidden from awareness, that enter into these psychological processes. While biases increase the efficiency of information processing, they often do not lead to the most appropriate action. We highlight the advantages of group decision-making in overcoming biases and searching the hypothesis space for good models of the world and good solutions to problems. Diversity of group members can facilitate these achievements, but diverse groups also face their own problems. We discuss means of managing these pitfalls and make some recommendations on how to make better group decisions.

The article is here.

Face-saving or fair-minded: What motivates moral behavior?

Alexander W. Cappelen  Trond Halvorsen  Erik Ø. Sørensen  Bertil Tungodden
Journal of the European Economic Association (2017) 15 (3): 540-557.

Abstract

We study the relative importance of intrinsic moral motivation and extrinsic social motivation in explaining moral behavior. The key feature of our experiment is that we introduce a dictator game design that manipulates these two sources of motivation. In one set of treatments, we manipulate the moral argument for sharing, in another we manipulate the information given to the recipient about the context of the experiment and the dictator's decision. The paper offers two main findings. First, we provide evidence of intrinsic moral motivation being of fundamental importance. Second, we show that extrinsic social motivation matters and is crowding-in with intrinsic moral motivation. We also show that intrinsic moral motivation is strongly associated with self-reported charitable giving outside the lab and with political preferences.

The research is here.

Is Human Morality a Product of Evolution?

By Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic
Originally posted on December 2, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

There are many theories for why humans became ultra-social. Tomasello subscribes to the idea that it’s at least partly a consequence of the way early humans fed themselves. After humans and chimpanzees diverged from their common ancestor around 6 million years ago, the two species adopted very different strategies for obtaining food: Chimpanzees, who eat mostly fruit, gather and eat the majority of their food alone; humans, by contrast, became collaborative foragers. The fossil record shows that as early as 400,000 years ago, they were working together to hunt large game, a practice that some researchers believe may have arisen out of necessity—when fruits and vegetables were scarce, early humans could continue the difficult work of foraging and hunting small game on their own, or they could band together to take home the higher reward of an animal with more meat.

Chimps show no signs of this ability. “It is inconceivable,” Tomasello has said, “that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” In one of the earliest studies of chimpanzee cooperation, published in 1937, chimpanzees only worked together to pull in a board with food on it after they’d been extensively trained by an experimenter—they showed no natural ability to do it on their own. (Even when chimpanzees do collaborate, there’s been no evidence to date that they have the ability to adopt complementary roles in group efforts or establish a complex division of labor.)

The entire article is here.