Governance and Technology Systems: The Challenge of Emerging Technologies

Abstract

Technological change at current scale is not a series of isolated events, but a movement towards new, locally stable, earth systems states. These states integrate natural, environmental, cultural, theological, institutional, financial, managerial, technological, built and human dimensions, and change worldviews, and cultural and moral values. While technologies do not define these integrated earth system states, except by convenience, they are an important destabilizing force across society, generating not just new opportunities but also continuing transition costs. Moreover, because technologies create such powerful comparative advantages as between cultures, those cultures that attempt to block technology will, all things equal, eventually be dominated by those that embrace it. The implications of these dynamics, taken together, is that technological evolution will be difficult, if not impossible, to stop or even manage effectively. How to respond ethically, rationally, and responsibly to technological change is, therefore, both a difficult research question and a serious practical challenge to our existing legal and governance institutions.

So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be. … The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.– Heidegger (1977)¹

¹Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. (trans: Lovitt, W). New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks “The Turning,” 49; “The Age of the World Picture,” 136.