affect jobs in the future, for instance, or how access to technologies may simply lead to the poor getting poorer and the rich richer. We have little idea how to wield increasingly powerful gene-editing technologies responsibly. And we’re not sure yet whether the rapid development of artificial intelligence is going to make the world a better place or lead to the end of humanity as we know it! The harsh reality is that, while convergence is massively accelerating our technological capabilities, we still have little if any idea what might go wrong, or what the unintended consequences could be.
This is a theme that runs deeply through this book, and it’s one that gets to the heart of the morality and the ethics of the science and the technologies we develop and use. If we’re going to navigate the world of these converging technologies successfully, we’re going to have to start thinking more creatively and innovatively about where we’re going as a species, what could go wrong, and what we need to do to make things go right. Of course, movies are not the most reliable guide here, and I’d hate to give the impression that surviving and thriving in the twenty-first century is as easy as watching a few films. But they do provide a platform for exploring some of the more intriguing and important emerging and converging trends in technology innovation, and the tension between developing them responsibly and ensuring they reach their full potential. And here they touch on another common theme that threads through the following chapters: the challenges and opportunities of socially responsible innovation.
Socially Responsible Innovation
The movie The Man in the White Suit (chapter ten) is perhaps one of the less well-known films in this book, but it is one that admirably highlights this tension between impactful and often well-intentioned innovation and unforeseen social consequences. In the movie, Sidney Stratton is a scientist with a vision. And that vision is to create the perfect fabric, one that’s incredibly strong, doesn’t wear out, and never needs washing. There’s only one problem: He never bothered to ask anyone else what they thought of his invention. As a result, he finds himself attracting the ire of his co-workers, the textile industry, the local union, and even his landlady. Stratton made the classic mistake of thinking that, just because he could do something, others would love it.
Even though the movie was made back in 1951, it eloquently captures the idea of socially responsible innovation. This is another theme that threads through this book, and it’s one that is deeply intertwined with the opportunities and challenges presented by converging technologies.
Responsible Innovation (sometimes referred to as Responsible Research and Innovation) is a hot topic these days. There’s even an academic journal devoted to it. The thinking behind responsible innovation is that we don’t always have a second or third chance to get things right when developing new technologies, and so it’s better to think about the potential consequences as early as we can, and take action to avoid the bad ones as early in the development process as possible. There are plenty of formal definitions for responsible innovation.2 But many of these boil down to ensuring that anyone who is potentially impacted by technological innovation has a say in how it’s developed and used, and taking steps to ensure innovation that leads to a better future for as many people as possible, without causing undue harm. This is easy to say, of course, but fiendishly difficult to put into practice.
This idea of social responsibility comes up time and time again in the movies here. In many cases, a film’s dramatic tension draws directly on some person or organization not thinking about the consequences of what they are doing, or being too arrogant to see their blind spots (this is apparent straight out of the gate with Jurassic Park in chapter two). This makes for compelling narratives, but it also opens the way for surprisingly nuanced approaches to exploring what might go wrong with emerging technologies if we don’t think of who they will impact (and how), and how we can steer them toward better outcomes. And it opens the door to delving into something that is near and dear to my heart: grappling with the risks of new and unusual technologies.
Most of my professional life has been involved with risk in one way or another. Much of my early published scientific research was aimed at reducing the health risks from inhaling airborne particles. I’ve worked extensively on understanding and reducing the health and environmental risks of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies. I’ve taught risk assessment, I’ve written about risk, and I’ve run academic centers that are all about risk. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that I have less and less patience for how many people tend to think about risk.
The problem is that, while established approaches to risk work reasonably well when it comes to protecting people and the environment from conventional technologies, they run out of steam rather fast when we’re facing technologies that can achieve things we never imagined. To coopt a Biblical metaphor, we’re in danger of desperately trying to squeeze the new wine of technological innovation into the old wineskins of conventional risk thinking, and at some point, something’s going to give. If we’re to develop new technologies in socially responsible ways, we need to realign how we think about risk with the capabilities of the innovations we’re creating.
This is the idea behind the concept of Risk Innovation, which is where much of my current work lies.3 Over the past couple of hundred years—pretty much since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—we’ve become quite adept at developing new ways of causing harm. And over time we’ve become equally adept at developing ways of assessing and managing the risks associated with innovation, whether they arise from mining and manufacturing, exposure to new chemicals and materials, or pollution. But these approaches to risk belong to a different world than the one we’re now creating. With emerging and converging technologies, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, in order to navigate a radically shifting risk landscape, we need equally radical innovation in how to think about and act on risk.
Perhaps not surprisingly, risk is at the core of all the movies here. Each of these films has a risk-based narrative tension that keeps its audience hooked. Yet it’s not always apparent that it’s risk that keeps you glued to the screen, or holding your breath, or even reaching for the tissues in places. Most of us are used to thinking about risk in terms of someone’s life being put in danger, or perhaps the environment and ecosystems being threatened, and there’s plenty of this in the book. But these movies also explore other, subtler risks, including threats to dignity, belonging, identity, belief, even what it means to be human.
These are rather unconventional ways of thinking about risk, and they get at what is so important to us that our lives are diminished if it’s denied us, or taken from us. Because of this, they make considerable sense as we begin to think about how new technologies will potentially affect our lives and how to develop and use them responsibly. This is a way of thinking about risk that revolves around threats to what is important to us, whether it’s something we have and can’t face losing, or something we aspire to and cannot bear to lose sight of. This includes our health, our well-being, and the environment we live in, but it also extends to less tangible but equally important things that we deeply value.
In each of the movies here, the characters we follow risk either losing something of great importance to them, or being unable to gain something that they aspire to. In many of the movies, the types of risks these characters face aren’t always immediately obvious, but they profoundly impact the consequences of the technologies being developed and used, and it’s this insight that opens up interesting and new ways of thinking about the social consequences of technological innovation. And so we discover that, in Jurassic Park (chapter two), John Hammond’s dream of creating the world’s most amazing theme park is at risk. In the movie Never Let Me Go (chapter three), it’s the threat to Tommy’s hope for the future that brings us to tears. And in Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven), it’s Major Kusanagi’s sense of who and what she is. There are also more conventional risks in each of these movies. Yet, by revealing these less obvious risks, these movies reveal new and often powerful ways to think about developing new technologies without causing unnecessary and unexpected harm.
In this way,
