Description:

This paper compares the European Union technology monitoring and assessment system (TMA)  with the Chinese and US TMA systems. It also discusses features of TMA systems, notably with regard to methodologies used and their consistency over time. Technology Monitoring and Assessment (TMA) plays a central role in enabling governments to respond to crises and rapid shifts in the global technological landscape. The EU’s global competitors have acknowledged this key role. Both the US and China have shown a clear link between defense and civilian research and innovation, coordinate their TMA organisations across policy domains, and enable it direct access to leadership. The EU TMA system is fragmented and uncoordinated and has only a weak link with the EU defense sector. Furthermore, it does not have direct access to leadership. The EU needs to develop a comprehensive TMA system by centralising the fragmented ecosystem of TMA systems within the European Commission, and ensure technology monitoring over the long term. It also needs to improve the link to leadership and emphasise coordination with the European defense sector and the Member States.    

Authors and their affiliations:

Sylvia Schwaag (Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences), César Dro (European Commission), Alexandra Mazak-Huemer (Austrian Council for Sciences, Technology, and Innovation)

Main Speaker: César Dro

Description:

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has a double significance for technology assessment (TA) practitioners. It is a rapidly evolving general technology with a broad societal impact that obviously needs to be assessed. On the other hand, AI is also a potentially transformative set of tools for knowledge workers such as TA practitioners themselves. AI offers the potential to enhance both productivity and quality across various tasks, while introducing challenges such as biases, misinformation, and opacity. In response, the Norwegian Board of Technology is conducting a project to explore how generative AI can support different technology assessment tasks, including horizon scanning, scenario development, and policy communication. The project aims to identify best practices, address ethical challenges, and explore opportunities for TA projects, contributing to shared principles of good practice. Key questions to address include: What are the most promising uses of generative AI in TA? What are the most significant challenges and risks, and how can they be mitigated? And what principles can guide the use of AI to align with good technology assessment?

Authors and their affiliations:

Ellen Strålberg (the Norwegian Board of Technology), Tore Tennøe (the Norwegian Board of Technology)

Main Speaker: Ellen Strålberg (Bio)

Additional Speaker: Tore Tennøe (Bio)

Description:

Community organising brings people together around common interests, values, artefacts, and competencies. In contrast to an abstract community, e.g., the ’academic community’, community organising develops a specific membership community with shared interests and goals. You know who you are together with and for what purpose, and are served tools that help you interact. As such, a community fosters a sense of belonging and increases interaction on different levels. Mutual learning becomes a habit, the need for leadership is set aside in favor of a bottom-up approach. That takes time, leadership, patience, and a group of motivated community bui   lders. But compared to the difficulty of establishing and running a formal institution, community building mostly depends on motivation. If you have that, and a real need for the community, then you will probably succeed. The presentation draws on experiences from local green communities in Denmark, a research community in brain science, and decades of experience with European parliamentary technology assessment.

Authors and their affiliations:

Lars Klüver (Democracy X Foundation)

Main Speaker: Lars Klüver

As an emerging research field, critical hype studies become relevant for technology assessment (TA). Hype affects assessment and political regulation of technology, steers S&T trajectories, and creates false expectations by overpromising technological capabilities. With the panel we leverage collective experiences and co-creatively build foundational structures to foster a TA perspective on hype. Acknowledging that hype holds epistemic, behavioral, communicative, urbanistic, environmental and affective agencies, this panel has two aims: presenting the activities of the research group critical hype studies; and sharing contributions to explore the assessment of hype and a reflection about what kinds of methods can be designed to assess hype in order to inform policy makers and TA practitioners. With global communication structures, hype also becomes a global phenomenon, needed to be addressed from a global perspective. Given the rising importance of global TA, we explore how hype assessment is conducted in different socio-political and cultural contexts.

Convenors and their affiliations:

Wenzel Mehnert (AIT, Vienna & TU Berlin), Andreu Belsunces (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona), Jascha Bareis (ITAS, Karlsruhe & HIIG, Berlin), Max Roßmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ola Michalec (University of Bristol), Vassilis Galanos (University of Stirling)

Description:

Hype redistributes attention, capital, and resources, prioritizing certain futures. When driven by powerful actors, it shapes imagination and influences investors, policymakers, and technologists. Since the 1980s, a cyberlibertarian, anarcho-capitalist agenda has emerged around crypto. Today, amid the AI and crypto hype, cyberlibertarianism—an anti-democratic, technocratic, and free-market ideology—gains traction, threatening democracy. This presentation examines how Sam Altman’s World(coin), framed as AI-driven infrastructure, leverages hype, extracting hope and fear, to advance the cyberlibertarian transition. A discourse and political economy analysis reveals how its hype sustains risky future visions. It then introduces a hype assessment framework to help regulators counter anti-democratic tech visions, foster futures literacy, and strengthen technology assessment at multiple governance levels.

Authors and their affiliations:

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

Main Speaker: Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves (Bio)

Description:

TA bases itself on liberal democratic premises. There is growing skepticism based on empirical insights that liberal democratic countries are increasingly dysfunctional and fail at delivering on their promises. Parameters on the input side, like equal inclusion and participation in discourse and representation, or comprehensibility of political processes, and parameters on the output side, like pacification of inequalities, elite control, problem solving capacity, or environmental protection are not working anymore. I argue that these unacceptable conditions are bridged with the societal performance of hype in liberal democracies – whereas “listen to the science” is not feasible politics anymore. For the demos such drastic interventions in their project of self-realization and autonomy are too demanding, too stressful and simply overburdening.     For global technology assessment, these processes are of uttermost importance. If democratic values are in crisis and Western countries perform political double standards – how can TA be a guiding model for other countries? If democracy becomes dysfunctional, isn’t the epistemological and normative self-understanding of TA eroding with it?

Authors and their affiliations:

Jascha Bareis (ITAS)

Main Speaker: Jascha Bareis (Bio)

Description:

"Strong Opinions, Weakly Held": How Finance Shapes Hype in Silicon Valley
Critical analyses of Silicon Valley often focus on the problem of ideology, deconstructing techno-utopian claims in an effort to address the harmful outcomes of corporate technology projects. As this focus on ideology can locate the problem within individuals and their beliefs, this paper instead directs analytic attention to the structural conditions through which these publicly circulating narratives are produced, exploring how centering analysis around institutionalized contexts can change our understanding of what drives industry behaviors. Using empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted in Silicon Valley between 2022 and 2024, I show how hyped claims are cultivated as a way to initiate action within the uncertainty of venture capital’s speculative financial models, representing weakly held beliefs that are subject to change in the face of shifting investor interest and market conditions. For scholars who may hope to positively affect society with critical analysis, this paper highlights the importance of engaging with the constraints felt by so-called powerful actors in untangling how power structures continue to be reproduced in the face of critical inquiry.

Authors and their affiliations:

Michelle Venetucci (Yale University)

Main Speaker: Michelle Venetucci (Bio)

Description:

Science fiction (SF) serves as a mirror and a guide to society's relationship with technological innovation, reflecting shared anxieties and aspirations while shaping the expectations towards emerging technologies. This paper investigates the interplay between SF and in particular its western dominated narratives shaping technologies on a global scale. By tracing SF's role in fostering cultural imaginaries, this work highlights how these narratives impact societal acceptance, inspire technological innovation, and reinforce unfounded hype beyond the entertainment industry. This research offers a critical, hermeneutic perspective to evaluate SF’s influence on technology. It explores the dialectic between utopian and dystopian narratives, emphasizing the risks of reductive readings that commodify SF into mere product roadmaps, neglecting its nuanced critique of sociocultural dynamics. The paper offers a hermeneutic perspective to evaluate SF’s influence on technology. Ultimately, this analysis calls for integrating SF into a systematic approach to hype assessment, recognizing its role as a driver of global technology hype.

Authors and their affiliations:

Wenzel Mehnert (Austrian Institute of Technology & Technical University of Berlin)

Main Speaker: Wenzel Mehnert (Bio)

Description:

Let’s look at a small sample of headlines relating to quantum computing: “Quantum Computing Just Might Save the Planet”, “Quantum Computing Could Change the Way the World Uses Energy”, “Quantum Computing will be Bigger than the Discovery of Fire!” People with longer memories may recall: “Saving the Planet with Robots, Microbes, and Nanotechnology.” Should we pay attention this time? Or is this just another red herring trotted out by tech optimists?  Separating uncritical, unbridled enthusiasm from realistic expectations around benefits and risks is difficult at early stages of technology development. It is a challenge that, with quantum computing, is complicated by an impenetrable vocabulary, i.e. terms like qubits, entanglement, superposition, and decoherence, and a theory that has led scientists like Richard Feynman to utter, “Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.”  This talk presents a case study supported by the Internet Society Foundation which was designed to develop some realistic estimates of quantum computing development and deployment - from timing, to impacts, to addressing a more general question: How could society support the development of sustainable quantum computing?

Authors and their affiliations:

Dave Rejeski (Visiting Scholar Environmental Law Institute Washington, DC)

Main Speaker: Dave Rejeski (Bio)

Description:

Technology assessment (TA) is a research, advisory and engagement practice that fosters the democratization of knowledge to support decision-making on technology and innovation. In times where democracy is challenged by autocracy, concentration of power in monopolist companies and powerful individuals, it seems timely to rethink adequate strategies. We are experiencing the erosion of the legitimacy of public institutions and political parties, and the increasing inability of political systems to make decisions, laws, and policies that actually work and manage to deal with complex social challenges. We argue that TA would benefit from integrating a diversity of bodies of knowledge from different sources, e.g., scientific or citizen knowledge, from operating at different scales, e.g. local or global, specific or generic, and from working with a diversity of objects, e.g. knowledge about socio-technical developments, transformative knowledge or anticipatory knowledge. Integrating such diverse types of knowledge in TA practices is already a challenge at the national level and will be even more so on the global level. Yet, it is also the global perspective that reverses the gaze and challenges us to include more voices and perspectives in our practices.

Authors and their affiliations:

Bjørn Bedsted (Democracy x), Eefje Cuppen (Rathenau Instituut & Leiden University)

Main Speaker: Bjørn Bedsted (Bio)

Additional Speaker: Eefje Cuppen (Bio)

Description:

On the basis of a “rational” approach to technology assessment (TA), with the general purpose of developing a robust rational solution, principles of good practice can be identified. These can then be applied to guide quality of assessments to strengthen TA world-wide. In my presentation, I will first provide insights into the approach and fields of application, before presenting and discussing the foundations of rational TA. Furthermore, I will present goals and challenges of epistemically and socially robust policy advice and analyse them with regard to quality criteria. I will then discuss principles of good practice for elaborating good rational solutions in TA activities on any scale: local, regional, national, transnational, and global. These principles are based on system-theoretical approaches and experiences from various projects, mainly funded by German national ministries. The goal is to ensure   transparency and adequacy of normative elements, robustness and opportuneness and enabling prospective analyses. The focus should be on problem-orientation instead of academic research, on ensuring process quality, as well as on enabling sufficient transfer expenses and applicability of results.

Authors and their affiliations:

Bert Droste-Franke (IQIB)

Main Speaker: Bert Droste-Franke (Bio)

Description:

This paper examines how Open Science is operationalized in transnational research, using the EU Horizon 2020 project PRODIGEES as a case study. While Open Science promotes transparency and collaboration, it also introduces governance challenges, institutional disparities, and tensions between local, national, and global frameworks. This study explores how EU-funded projects navigate these power asymmetries. Using a Science, Technology & Society (STS) perspective, this paper critically assesses Open Science as both enabling and constraining. PRODIGEES’ initiatives –open-access mandates, transnational open access trainings, and policy labs – illustrate how institutions engage with EU Open Science frameworks while addressing local research priorities, digital divides, and resource inequities. PRODIGEES reveals both the potential and limits of Open Science in fostering equitable knowledge exchange. Structural imbalances highlight the need for context-sensitive policies. Open Science must go beyond access and transparency to address governance, institutional agency, and transnational power dynamics to ensure a more inclusive global research ecosystem.

Authors and their affiliations:

Benjamin Stewart (German Institute of Development and Sustainability - IDOS)

Main Speaker: Benjamin Stewart (Bio)

Description:

The development of quantum technologies (QT) is widely regarded as a transformative force with the potential to reshape numerous sectors, including communication, computation, and security. This study examines how national and international dynamics influence QT development through a technology assessment (TA) lens. It explores how researchers perceive local and global factors shaping QT development and how these factors impact the research ecosystem. To address these questions, qualitative data was gathered from ten QT researchers in academy, industry, and governance bodies from 13 countries of diverse geopolitical contexts. The findings highlight three key dynamics. Another focus of the study is to consider ways in which TA can serve as a tool to provide strategies for QT development with its maximum potential on a global scale. Therefore, the intricate relationship of emerging technologies, policy frameworks, and international coordination is tackled with the valuable perspective on how TA can contribute to handling barriers of the development of the QT.

Authors and their affiliations:

M.Sc. Ayşe Ayda GERÇEK (Middle East Technical University), Assist. Prof. Dr. Arsev Umur AYDINOĞLU (Middle East Technical University), Dr. Yelda ERDEN TOPAL (Middle East Technical University)

Main Speaker: M.Sc. Ayşe Ayda Gerçek

Description:

The global scope of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction presents states with a multilateral structure, orienting national efforts to prevent and manage disasters as well as mitigate their effects. I analyze the Framework's implications for a global technology assessment in the arena of civil protection: First, how does the Sendai Framework present the relationship between social and technological aspects of disaster risk reduction? What kinds of sociotechnical visions does it entail? And second, what consequences does the Framework’s portrayal of technological and sociotechnical roles in disaster risk reduction have for the possibilities and limits of a global TA focused on technologies developed or employed for civil protection? I highlight critical issues for a global assessment of technologies used to mitigate and manage risks to civil security, such as the link between programmatic priorities in technological development and public visions of desirable futures, as well as the role of sociopolitical context in technology assessment. Ultimately, I consider how the Sendai Framework has informed national strategies for handling risk and crisis and strengthening societal resilience.

Authors and their affiliations:

Naomi Shulman (TU Braunschweig), Lasse Wennerhold (TU Braunschweig), Lars Gerhold (TU Braunschweig)

Main Speaker: Naomi Shulman (Bio)

Description:

The rapid pace of technological change, coupled with a pressing need for solutions to address grand societal challenges and global crises, heightens the challenge for policymakers to develop science, technology and innovation policies at speed and in situations of high uncertainty, involving complex situations (such as convergence), and, in some cases, around potentially controversial technology fields. Such science and technology policies require knowledge and evidence to support direction-setting, experimentation and learning about critical and emerging technologies. Therefore, providing decision-makers with timely and usable strategic intelligence on emerging technologies and their potential to transform society is essential. The OECD has been building its strategic intelligence capacity, with one element exploring forward-looking technology assessment to support the anticipatory governance of emerging and converging technologies. This presentation explores some of the challenges for international strategic intelligence.

Authors and their affiliations:

Douglas K. R. Robinson (OECD)

Main Speaker: Douglas K. R. Robinson (Bio)

Description:

What happens when technology assessment attempts to move beyond colonial modernity? Tom Wakeford will summarise some findings of the Intercultural Assessment of Synthetic Biology Applications (IASBA) which worked with Indigenous and campesino communities in Chile and Mexico. IASBA drew on the experiential and inter-generational learning of these experts-by-experience as they reflected on previous impositions of technologies under conditions of colonial modernity. Wakeford will review IASBA's progress towards a participatory assessment of synthetic biology and evaluate its attempts to translate these into the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. Given the increasing marginalisation of participatory TA by “tech-bros” and authoritarian governments, we have to ask what conditions would be needed for TA practitioners to escape our entanglements with both colonialism and modernity.

Authors and their affiliations:

Tom Wakeford (Seeding Reparations & University College London, UK)

Main Speaker: Tom Wakeford (Bio)

Description:

Technology assessment (TA) plays a vital role in evaluating the sustainability and resilience of products. For example, the repairability of printed circuit boards (PCBs) in the automotive industry is a significant aspect of electronic device sustainability because they require critical raw materials (CRMs) such as rare earths. Assessing these technologies on a global scale involves considering geopolitical risks, social impacts, and environmental factors. By integrating repairability and CRM assessments, it's possible to envision more sustainable products that address multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including reduced inequalities, peace, justice and strong institutions. There is an additional benefit of a reduced raw material consumption, which is the aim of the CRM act adopted by the EU in 2023. Our tool provides general insights into raw material mining, which, in combination with the known component suppliers, provides information about previously unknown dependencies. This holistic approach to TA enables the development of products that are not only environmentally friendly but also socially responsible and resilient to global supply interruptions.

Authors and their affiliations:

Tobias Hoiten (Institute for Information Technology OFFIS), Ole Meyer (Institute for Information Technology OFFIS),Lisa Dawel (Institute for Information Technology OFFIS), Alexandra Pehlken (Institute for Information Technology OFFIS)

Main Speaker: Tobias Hoiten

Description:

As global challenges grow, traditional methods of assessing Technology Assessment (TA) projects need reevaluation. The TAMI project, conducted in the early 2000s, has provided us with a framework for measuring the impact of TA. However, its linear, measurable approach fails to capture broader systemic effects. This session introduces "TAMI 2.0," a new approach embracing dynamic, participatory, and transdisciplinary perspectives. It aims to refine impact assessment methods by incorporating qualitative, participatory, and long-term perspectives while ensuring cultural adaptability for global challenges like climate change and digital transformation. Key questions include redefining TA’s "impact," exploring innovative evaluation methods (e.g., network mapping, participatory feedback), balancing global principles with local contexts, and assessing TA’s role in SDGs. The goal is to co-create an inclusive, effective framework for evaluating TA’s influence worldwide.

Authors and their affiliations:

Franziska Sörgel (ITAS), Julia Hahn (ITAS), Miltos Ladikas (ITAS)

Main Speaker: Franziska Sörgel (Bio)

Additional Speaker: Julia Hahn (Bio)

Description:

The idea of a “global technology assessment” (Global TA) has recently experienced an astonishing boom. With regard to its historical development, TA has always been a “travelling concept”. However, as Armin Grunwald argued, TA as idea and concept is related to democracy. Empirically, TA takes place in many countries all over the world, even in authoritarian ones. Therefore, the question arises  how TA is performed differently and what the basic conditions in fact are. Against this background, this paper is based on the thesis that the respective cultural-institutional contexts have to be described more specifically in order to  better understand the aligned varieties of technology assessment. To this end, the concept of “varieties of science”, which is based on Ulrich Beck's Sociology of Cosmopolitisation,  is introduced to analyze such cultural-institutional differences. By doing so, the concept of varieties of science will be presented. This perspective will be further explored by analyzing the evolution of TA in a set of contrasting countries. Finally, by discussing the significance of these insights for understanding global TA, a future research agenda is outlined.

Authors and their affiliations:

Stefan Böschen (Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Cultures of Research", RWTH Aachen University)

Main Speaker: Stefan Böschen (Bio)

Description:

The form and function of technology assessment (TA) has evolved significantly over time. Compared to its more traditional description of technological application and the analysis of impacts, TA is now also associated with more complex issues like future visions and societal embedding. However, it could be argued that this broadened scope of TA – in combination with often tailor-made approaches to analyse context-specific challenges – can result in conceptual confusion and increase socio-epistemic complexity. In this contribution, we argue that for TA to be effective, there is a need for clear conceptualisation and an overall reduction of complexity. To realise this, we propose an analytical approach that allows for the modularisation of technological innovation systems, particularly in relation to actor types and associated functions. By means of agent-based modelling – with a focus on energy systems – we provide some examples of how such an approach can be applied to practical challenges, as well as how specific multi-level solutions can be provided to improve advisory practice in different socio-political environments.

Authors and their affiliations:

Davy van Doren (IQIB GmbH), Markus Voge (IQIB GmbH), Bert Droste-Franke (IQIB GmbH)

Main Speaker: Davy van Doren (Bio)

Description:

Globalizing Technology Assessment (TA) presents diverse challenges and opportunities. It is a field and practice characterized by a wide range of projects, approaches, and practices. Beyond merely expanding its geographical scope, globalizing TA necessitates engaging with the normative, cultural, and methodological diversity that constitute its 'assessments' and 'transformative interventions'. This paper will propose guiding variables to analyze the critical-reflective affordances of TA approaches, projects, and practices. These variables aim to identify spaces for reflection and/or critique that TA fosters to problematize and debate regarding science, technology, and innovation. The ultimate goal is to provide tools to enhance TA’s transformative capacity and promote more socio-politically robust and inclusive initiatives.

Authors and their affiliations:

University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

Main Speaker: Sergio Urueña (Bio)

As an emerging research field, critical hype studies become relevant for technology assessment (TA). Hype affects assessment and political regulation of technology, steers S&T trajectories, and creates false expectations by overpromising technological capabilities. With the panel we leverage collective experiences and co-creatively build foundational structures to foster a TA perspective on hype. Acknowledging that hype holds epistemic, behavioral, communicative, urbanistic, environmental and affective agencies, this panel has two aims: presenting the activities of the research group critical hype studies; and sharing contributions to explore the assessment of hype and a reflection about what kinds of methods can be designed to assess hype in order to inform policy makers and TA practitioners. With global communication structures, hype also becomes a global phenomenon, needed to be addressed from a global perspective. Given the rising importance of global TA, we explore how hype assessment is conducted in different socio-political and cultural contexts.

Convenors and their affiliations:

Wenzel Mehnert (AIT, Vienna & TU Berlin), Andreu Belsunces (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona), Jascha Bareis (ITAS, Karlsruhe & HIIG, Berlin), Max Roßmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ola Michalec (University of Bristol), Vassilis Galanos (University of Stirling)

Description:

Cultivated meat has been marketed as a groundbreaking innovation, offering solutions to global challenges like sustainability, animal welfare, and food security. However, despite significant investments and policy attention, it faces increasing scrutiny due to unresolved ecological, economic, and technical issues. The hype surrounding the technology has fueled political opposition, with countries like Italy, some states in the USA, and other European countries considering or enacting legislation to limit or ban its commercialization. This presentation explores the polarized discourse on cultivated meat, examining both the hype driving its promotion and the neglect it faces due to concerns about the role of animal agriculture. The talk analyzes the challenges posed by contrasting perspectives, uncertainty, and hype for technology assessment and policy-making.

Authors and their affiliations:

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH

Main Speaker: Arianna Ferrari (Bio)

Description:

Cultivated meat (CM) is surrounded by promises about its positive impact on animal welfare, climate, public health, and food safety but also by uncertainties about its sustainability, affordability, and impact on power relations in the food sector. This contribution stems from the EU-funded project “PRISM-LT” and focuses on public perceptions of CM. It reflects on methodological approaches to identify the CM hype and examine its impact based on a media analysis from the Netherlands and Germany. The hype around CM may have contributed to short-term but rapidly drying up private investments, exaggerated fears among the public and agricultural stakeholders, and political backlash including legislative bans. Because of, or despite the controversies, there are relatively few TA projects and reports on CM. Such projects sometimes come with a rather narrow thematic, geographic, and methodological focus. A global TA approach involving stakeholders and the public could help foster cooperation, tackle technological challenges, and contribute to an evidence-based debate on the feasibility and desirability of CM.

Authors and their affiliations:

Martina Baumann (RU, Nijmegen-ISiS and KIT, Karlsruhe-ITAS)

Main Speaker: Martina Baumann (Bio)

Description:

Hopes are a special kind of Hype where high expectations towards some form of innovation are not built in the innovative process, as usual, but where an emerging innovation meets a rather full-grown set of expectations. A cure for cancer or reliable nuclear fusion are cases in point. Hopes regularly accompany grand societal challenges, where pressing problems imply collectively accepting a solution without a concrete innovation in sight. Whoever could suggest a promising path towards such a solution, then, expects extraordinary appreciation. This means easy opportunities, but it also suggests a matrix of difficulties if the hope is disappointed. Discrepancies obscured during the building of the hope may surface more visibly as the “promise-requirement cycle” picks up. As they are ubiquitous in, and determine the discursive and legitimising dynamics of, grand societal challenges, a robust research program on hopes is necessary. Drawing on a diversity of approaches, the presentation aims at stimulating a discussion and fixing some first conceptual and methodical guideposts for the assessment of the dynamics of hopes in societal transformation and beyond.

Authors and their affiliations:

Filippo Reale (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Main Speaker: Filippo Reale (Bio)

Description:

This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis conducted on WIRED's digital content regarding three emerging technologies: non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse, and generative AI. The analysis identified a common element in WIRED’s journalistic narratives about these technologies: the predominance of hype surrounding them. The journalistic content reflects both industry and public perceptions, which imbue an exaggerated enthusiasm towards the emergence of these three technologies. However, WIRED not only reports on the hype surrounding NFTs, the metaverse, and generative AI, but also sustains it through persistent and repeated attention to these technologies. In doing so, the magazine actively participates in journalistic, digital, and technological trends that reinforce a sense of constant technological innovation. This suggests that WIRED engages in a fast-paced informational approach that amplifies the hype around these technologies by enthusiastically incorporating perspectives that explore different facets of the latest updates on emerging technologies and their implications into its journalistic coverage.

Authors and their affiliations:

Guillermo Echauri (UNAM, Mexico)

Main Speaker: Guillermo Echauri

Description:

In our contribution we explore the tension between hype and responsibility in the communication of AI research in Germany, focusing on how engineers perceive and navigate this dynamic. Through qualitative interviews and a co-creative Lego Serious Play workshop with engineers, social scientists, and science communicators, we examine how expectations surrounding AI shape researchers’ everyday practices. Specifically, we attempt to understand how researchers perceive their own communicative agency against the backdrop of a highly charged discursive context. Our work points to a productive field of tension. On the one hand, there are affordances of hyping AI (‘AI sells’). On the other hand, our interlocutors describe structures strongly curtailing their perceived space of agency to critically engage with AI narratives they consider as hyperbolic. Our findings contribute to discussions on the role of TA in navigating the societal implications of AI by shedding light on how researchers perceive their communicative agency in a innovation landscape shaped by both institutional constraints and commercial incentives.

Authors and their affiliations:

Dominic Lammar (Technical University of Munich), Prof. Dr. Maja Horst (Aarhus University), Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller (Technical University of Munich)

Main Speaker: Dominic Lammar (Bio)

Description:

As the European Union (EU) solidifies its regulatory influence on the global stage, the concepts of the Brussels Effect according to Bradford,    denoting a spread of EU regulatory approaches  beyond the EU, and digital sovereignty have emerged as pivotal elements in technology policy discourse. This study reflects on their implications within the framework of technology assessment (TA) and offers insights into their relevance for the Global South. The presentation conducts a comparative analysis of data protection legislation and artificial intelligence (AI) regulation in emerging countries such as Mexico, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Indonesia. By exploring the legislative and practical responses in these nations, this research assesses whether the Brussels Effect serves as a viable reference model. Grounded in twelve months of empirical field research, the paper evaluates the reception of Europe’s "Third Way" approach. It investigates how the EU’s GDPR and AI Act have influenced national data protection laws and AI regulations in the selected countries and evaluates their enforcement. Moreover, it highlights the need for a TA framework that accommodates the socio-economic conditions of the Global South while fostering effective technology policy advice.

Authors and their affiliations:

Ingrid Schneider (University of Hamburg)

Main Speaker: Ingrid Schneider (Bio)

Description:

Can TA practices be scaled up to reach and engage a global audience? Can there be a global TA organization? Given the normative and philosophical roots of TA that make it unique among other practices that aim to support decision-making and public debate, answering these questions requires us to consider TA’s relation to democracy. We do so by providing a brief overview of four theories of democracy that we find relevant and useful for making sense of TA’s crucial role and activity in the tumultuous times that many democracies are currently experiencing. We first look at the theories of discursive and deliberative democracy developed by Benjamin Barber and Jürgen Habermas, which are often considered by the TA community to be at the core of TA’s rationales and methodologies. Then, we include the ideas of two authors who theorized agonistic models of democracy – Noortje Marres and Chantal Mouffe – whose approaches that value conflict and dissensus have somehow been neglected by the TA community and by scholarly work on TA. Identifying what we call ‘disturbance zones’ at the intersection of these democratic theories will allow us to consider the global politics of technology assessment.

Authors and their affiliations:

Pierre Delvenne (University of Liège), Céline Parotte (University of Liège)

Main Speaker: Pierre Delvenne (Bio)

Description:

Social and ecological sensitivity is a commonly proclaimed objective of engineering education, though there is no consensus on how to balance it with efficiency and employability.. We argue that technology assessment (TA) is both compatible and complementary with engineering curricula as long as it tackles its basic elements: knowledge, norms and imaginaries. TA’s practical orientation enables foresight on acceptance or failure of technologies. Its focus on collaboration develops social imagination and perspective-taking for the largely impersonalized technological practices. Its interest in visions resonates with the futurism which dominates engineering culture. In China, TA has been to some extent integrated into curricula through two primary approaches: (1) stand-alone courses, e.g. chemical TA, and (2) embedded modules within specialized courses like atomic engineering, technological innovation and entrepreneurship, science, technology and public policy. Additionally, engineering assessment, focusing on project evaluation and incorporating TA, has been taught to both engineering and management students. In our report, we discuss if and how TA case studies can be applied in various engineering disciplines.

Authors and their affiliations:

Aleksandra Kazakova (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Wang Dazhou (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Main Speaker: Aleksandra Kazakova (Bio)

Additional Speaker: Dazhou Wang (Bio)

Description:

The cosmopolitan commitments of science are well-known. They inhere in the very idea of a republic of scholars or a scientific community as articulated be theorists like Immanuel Kant, Robert K. Merton, or Jürgen Habermas – and by many scientists themselves. It is also well-known that these commitments break down quickly in times of crisis and war. Also, when scientists organize for the promotion of peaceful research (the Pugwash movement, for example), they do so usually in the name of civic virtues and values and thereby set themselves off against other scientists who work unencumbered by such civic obligations. The situation is even more complicated for the engineering sciences which, often enough, owe their very existence to national ambitions, wartime efforts or economic competition. Are there cosmopolitan commitments in engineering practice or do those need to be specifically created and upheld by small groups of dedicated engineers?

Authors and their affiliations:

Alfred Nordmann (IANUS-Verein für friedensorientierte Technikgestaltung e.V.)

Main Speaker: Alfred Nordmann (Bio)

Description:

Right-wing libertarianism has emerged on the global political stage, as the election of Javier Milei in Argentina has confirmed. With figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel influencing the new US administration, its impact on democracy, governance, and technology assessment (TA) could be profound. Unlike neoliberalism, which downplays social concerns, right-wing libertarianism actively attacks state institutions while promoting extreme techno-solutionism as a quasi-religious belief. This shift is not an isolated event but part of broader transformations driven by digital capitalism and platform economies, reshaping labour, governance, and human agency. TA and related activities must contend with outdated techno-social paradigms and a growing disregard for rational discourse. To remain relevant and effective, TA must critically engage with this political force, identifying strategies to protect and strengthen its role in democratic decision-making.

Authors and their affiliations:

Hernán Borisonik (UNSAM-CONICET), Christopher Coenen (ITAS-KIT)

Main Speaker: Hernán Borisonik (Bio)

Additional Speaker: Christopher Coenen (Bio)

Description:

Technology assessment (TA) emerged in the USA in the late 1960s in response to technologization. Today, it has established itself around the world and appears to be gaining even more relevance in light of current transformations. However, TA is still organized along nation-state boundaries and fragmented on a global scale. The question arises: To what extent can TA be described as “global” at all? And, given this, what specifies the differences between its national implementations? The paper provides an analytical perspective by unfolding the thesis that TA can be described as a globally operating system, whose specific design varies depending on its national context. First, based on the systems theory, the unity of TA is examined as a social system, which, along the distinction between technology and environment, facilitates a reflection on technologization. Secondly, its differences are reconstructed from national contexts, using the Varieties of Capitalism approach. As a result, a theoretical framework is formed to observe different “Varieties of TA” worldwide, contributing to both a broader understanding and comparability of TA, as well as to the formation of a global TA-Community.

Authors and their affiliations:

Florian Hoffmann (University of Speyer)

Main Speaker: Florian Hoffmann (Bio)

Description:

Quantum technology 2.0, based on quantum properties such as entanglement, superposition and interference, promises major breakthroughs in sensing, communication, computation and simulation which harbour promises in areas such as medicine, finance, biochemistry and logistics. Yet, impediments to the prudent development and deployment of quantum technology include security threats, absence of regulatory frameworks and standards, inflated business outlooks, lack of interoperability with prevailing systems and ethical worries pertaining to privacy, transparency, equitability and inclusivity. All of these challenges are of a global nature. While global action, concerning regulation of dual use, export controls, new encryption standards, ethical guidelines and fair use of quantum computers, is set in motion, international diplomacy could do with more coordination, for example through a global technology oversight body. This body should be informed by both prospective and constructive TA, for which I will discuss a number of options. Should global quantum diplomacy fail, the world will be exposed to a hazardous ‘quantum race’ and perchance face dire consequences.

Authors and their affiliations:

Bart Karstens (Rathenau Institute)

Main Speaker: Bart Karstens (Bio)