Anticipating Solutions

Anticipatory governance, with its concentration on foresight, engagement, and integration (roughly forecasting technological change, engaging with the public concerning that forecasted change and the desires of the public concerning that change, and integrating the public’s input into the trajectory of that technology) serves a vital function for attempting to avoid what Alvin Toffler refers to as “future shock”, or the state of psychological distress caused by “too much change in too short a time period”. There is no doubt that technological change has been accelerating rapidly, especially since Toffler’s book, and that a process is needed to ensure that society has some sort of say in what the future’s shape turns out to be.

Although I admire the work done to construct this process, I have two nagging thoughts that unfortunately seem to have not been addressed in the anticipatory governance literature: the potential for politicization of this process, and the potential for the public to truly engage with it.

First, the potential for politicization of this framework, if it is applied on a large scale and is integrated with the technology policymaking process, is enormous. One does not need to have much foresight to see how this framework will be addressed by the popular news media, political parties, or economic interests. The potential for the corruption of this framework, like the potential for regulatory capture, the distortion of markets, the influencing of elections (or any economic or political arena, really) leads one to question if this framework can be spared the same fate when it is brought out of the university and implemented on a larger scale. Being a political scientist, I can guarantee that relevant interests, when they see the opportunity to distort how the public feels and communicates concerns about a particular technology, will attempt to influence the proceedings. Constructing an apparatus that tries to insulate the operations of this framework from these interests should be an important part of the intellectual planning before wide-scale implementation is sought.

The above may be a bit pessimistic, however. Other regulatory bodies that attempt to steer technologies in safer directions, like the FDA, have had success in protecting the public from potentially damaging products. However, these institutions have learned that appropriate measures must be taken to insulate their proceedings from manipulative interests as much as possible. An institution based on anticipatory governance principles should look to these types of organizations for ways to protect its integrity while engaging the public as much as possible.

Second, although I’m certain the public is curious about new technologies and is capable of understanding their societal implications, I’m less certain that they’ll be able to or want to engage in such a framework as much as would be needed to truly make it a success. Miller and Bennet’s article presented a solid option that could keep the public engaged with possible technological scenarios, but, as the novelty wore off, would the public continue to engage in this way? The only way to really know would be to implement it, but more work should be done in this area to ensure that the most important pillar, public engagement, is successful. Even with these two objections, I still view this framework as the best that has been presented to deal with these issues, and I hope to see it continue to be pushed forward.