Anticipatory Ethics Research Articles

From speculation to reality: Enhancing anticipatory ethics for emerging technologies (ATE) in practice

Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the privations characterising parallel approaches. The ATE approach, also in practice, presents certain areas for retooling, such as how it characterises levels and objects of analysis. This paper results from the work done with the TechEthos Horizon 2020 project in evaluating the ethical, legal, and social impacts of climate engineering, digital extended reality, and neurotechnologies. To meet the challenges these technology families present, this paper aims to enhance the ATE framework to encompass the variety of human processes and material forms, functions, and applications that comprise the socio-technical systems in which these technologies are embedded.

Critical analysis of the AI impact on the patient-physician relationship: A multi-stakeholder qualitative study.

This qualitative study aims to present the aspirations, expectations and critical analysis of the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to transform patient-physician relationship, according to multi-stakeholder insight. This study was conducted from June to December 2021, using an anticipatory ethics approach and sociology of expectations as the theoretical frameworks. It focused mainly on three groups of stakeholders; namely, physicians (n = 12), patients (n = 15) and healthcare managers (n = 11), all of whom are directly related to the adoption of AI in medicine (n = 38). In this study, interviews were conducted with 40% of the patients in the sample (15/38), as well as 31% of the physicians (12/38) and 29% of health managers in the sample (11/38). The findings highlight the following: (1) the impact of AI on fundamental aspects of the patient-physician relationship and the underlying importance of a synergistic relationship between the physician and AI; (2) the potential for AI to alleviate workload and reduce administrative burden by saving time and putting the patient at the centre of the caring process and (3) the potential risk to the holistic approach by neglecting humanness in healthcare. This multi-stakeholder qualitative study, which focused on the micro-level of healthcare decision-making, sheds new light on the impact of AI on healthcare and the potential transformation of patient-physician relationship. The results of the current study highlight the need to adopt a critical awareness approach to the implementation of AI in healthcare by applying critical thinking and reasoning. It is important not to rely solely upon the recommendations of AI while neglecting clinical reasoning and physicians' knowledge of best clinical practices. Instead, it is vital that the core values of the existing patient-physician relationship - such as trust and honesty, conveyed through open and sincere communication - are preserved.

Ethics and governance in the digital age

This article argues that ethics need not be toothless or side-lined in the technology governance debates. Rather, moral evaluation is necessary, even when legal compliance is already possible. Moral evaluation supplies answers not only to what is legal or illegal, but also to what is good and better for society. The article first defends a pragmatist ethics approach to uncovering the inevitability of values and norms embedded in digital technologies and related to their design and use. It then makes the case for policymakers engaging in the anticipatory ethics of technology. This approach provides a toolbox to tackle moral dilemmas and better understand what trustworthiness and ethics mean in certain contexts. The convergence of ethics and policy is not only worth pursuing but a necessity for good technology governance if we are to achieve a Europe fit for the digital age.

Guidelines for Conducting Ethical Artificial Intelligence Research in Neurology: A Systematic Approach for Clinicians and Researchers.

Preemptive recognition of the ethical implications of study design and algorithm choices in artificial intelligence (AI) research is an important but challenging process. AI applications have begun to transition from a promising future to clinical reality in neurology. As the clinical management of neurology is often concerned with discrete, often unpredictable, and highly consequential events linked to multimodal data streams over long timescales, forthcoming advances in AI have great potential to transform care for patients. However, critical ethical questions have been raised with implementation of the first AI applications in clinical practice. Clearly, AI will have far-reaching potential to promote, but also to endanger, ethical clinical practice. This article employs an anticipatory ethics approach to scrutinize how researchers in neurology can methodically identify ethical ramifications of design choices early in the research and development process, with a goal of preempting unintended consequences that may violate principles of ethical clinical care. First, we discuss the use of a systematic framework for researchers to identify ethical ramifications of various study design and algorithm choices. Second, using epilepsy as a paradigmatic example, anticipatory clinical scenarios that illustrate unintended ethical consequences are discussed, and failure points in each scenario evaluated. Third, we provide practical recommendations for understanding and addressing ethical ramifications early in methods development stages. Awareness of the ethical implications of study design and algorithm choices that may unintentionally enter AI is crucial to ensuring that incorporation of AI into neurology care leads to patient benefit rather than harm.

Competing modes of responsibility in research organisations—Insights from an international comparison

Abstract Based on findings from research in the incorporation of responsible research and innovation in research organisations in twelve European and non-European countries, the article discusses how old (i.e. internal) and new (i.e. external) modes of responsibility coexist and compete with each other in actual research practice. Although the analysis shows ubiquitous perceived need for re-arranging the relations between science and society in order to legitimise scientific research in organisations, it also finds that the incumbent structures and cultures of internal thinking are still dominant in most organisations, which leads to considerable resistance to change. In particular, for public engagement and reflexive anticipatory ethics, strategies of conceptual and procedural demarcation are evident. Organisations adapt public engagement or reflexive ethics as extraordinary or experimental activities thus allowing for the continuation of the status quo in the perspective of the ‘republic of science’, keeping ‘internal’ affairs unaffected by societal intervention.

Review: Searching for an Autoethnographic Ethic, by Stephen Andrew

Review: Searching for an Autoethnographic Ethic, by Stephen Andrew

What Counts as “Success” in Speculative and Anticipatory Ethics? Lessons from the Advent of Germline Gene Editing

This discussion note offers a preliminary analysis of what recent developments in human germline gene editing tell us about the effectiveness of speculative and anticipatory modes of techno-ethics. It argues that the benefits of speculative discussions are difficult to detect thus far, and that pushing the focal point of ethical discourse well ahead of the current state of technology may prematurely undermine existing norms long before a broad consensus would justify moving beyond them.

Constructing the Meaning of Humanoid Sex Robots

Humanoid sex robots seem to challenge the human–machine distinction because one way to engage with them is to entertain the illusion that they are human and appropriate for intimacy. This inclination is intentionally induced by robot designers, and several narratives envision and claim that robots of the future will be indistinguishable from humans. Taking an anticipatory ethics approach and using critical discourse analysis, we argue that current discourse about sex robots does not adequately recognize the sociotechnical nature of humanoid sex robot development. We challenge the idea that the human–machine distinction will inevitably dissolve because of technological advancements. Recognition of the social influences on technological development is key to understanding the coherence, or lack thereof, of many narratives of the future that are currently put forward.

Co-Imagining the Futures of Implementation Precision Medicine Using Scenario Analysis and Design Fiction.

Precision medicine has a long history dating to the early 20th century when inquiries into the biochemical basis of large person-to-person variations in susceptibility to human diseases and response to medicines had first begun. Yet, personalized medicine in the 21st century is far from being "future-proof." Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, and changing human values and preferences, call for anticipatory, rather than reactive, approaches to the governance of precision medicine futures. In this context, anticipatory governance is an innovative approach to understanding technology and innovation futures. Anticipatory governance and its corollary anticipatory ethics on emerging technologies require interdisciplinary collaboration and communication to cultivate shared language, imagination, and orientation toward plausible sociotechnical innovation trajectories. This study reports, for the first time in the literature to the best of our knowledge, an anticipatory governance experiment on "implementation precision medicine (IPM)" using scenario analysis and design fiction. Participants were undergraduate students and experts who collaboratively imagined the plausible futures of precision medicine. Given the long history of the precision medicine field, and recent calls for translating big data to real-life clinical applications, implementation was chosen as a key focus area of precision medicine futures. We report here several plausible future innovation scenarios of interest to precision medicine scientists and engineers and researchers in the fields of emerging technology governance, responsible innovation, and social studies of science. Of importance, we found that the playful quality of the design fiction methodology and the pedagogical orientation facilitated by undergraduate student involvement created an engaging creative safe space to build transdisciplinary dialog examining the social and anticipatory ethics dimensions of IPM. Demonstrating the possibilities of such cross-disciplinary dialog and differential expertise, this article is conceptualized and coauthored by all participants further attesting to the importance of co-designing and co-imagining innovation futures in IPM.

Genomics and High-Consequence Infectious Diseases: A Scoping Review of Emerging Science and Potential Ethical Issues.

Host genomic research on high-consequence infectious diseases is a growing area, but the ethical, legal, and social implications of such findings related to potential applications of the research have not yet been identified. While there is a robust ethical debate about the ethical, legal, and social implications of research during an emergency, there has been less consideration of issues facing research conducted outside of the scope of emergency response. Addressing the implications of research at an early stage (anticipatory ethics) helps define the issue space, facilitates preparedness, and promotes ethically and socially responsible practices. To lay the groundwork for more comprehensive anticipatory ethics work, this article provides a preliminary assessment of the state of the field with a scoping review of host genomic research on a subset of high-consequence infectious diseases of relevance to high-level isolation units, focusing on its ethically relevant features and identifying several ethical, legal, and social implications raised by the literature. We discuss the challenges of genomic studies of low-frequency, high-risk events and applications of the science, including identifying targets to guide the development of new therapeutics, improving vaccine development, finding biomarkers to predict disease outcome, and guiding decisions about repurposing existing drugs and genetic screening. Some ethical, legal, and social implications identified in the literature included the rise of systems biology and paradigm shifts in medical countermeasure development; controversies over repurposing of existing drugs; genetic privacy and discrimination; and benefit-sharing and global inequity as part of the broader ecosystem surrounding high-level isolation units. Future anticipatory ethics work should forecast the science and its applications; identify a more comprehensive list of ethical, legal, and social implications; and facilitate evaluation by multiple stakeholders to inform the integration of ethical concerns into high-level isolation unit policy and practice.

Beyond Mendelian Genetics: Anticipatory Biomedical Ethics and Policy Implications for the Use of CRISPR Together with Gene Drive in Humans

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) genome editing has already reinvented the direction of genetic and stem cell research. For more complex diseases it allows scientists to simultaneously create multiple genetic changes to a single cell. Technologies for correcting multiple mutations in an in vivo system are already in development. On the surface, the advent and use of gene editing technologies is a powerful tool to reduce human suffering by eradicating complex disease that has a genetic etiology. Gene drives are CRISPR mediated alterations to genes that allow them to be passed on to subsequent populations at rates that approach one hundred per cent transmission. Therefore, from an anticipatory biomedical ethics perspective, it is possible to conceive gene drive being used with CRISPR to permanently ameliorate aberrant genes from wild-type populations containing mutations. However, there are also a number of possible side effects that could develop as the result of combining gene editing and gene drive technologies in an effort to eradicate complex diseases. In this paper, we critically analyse the hypothesis that the combination of CRISPR and gene drive will have a deleterious effect on human populations from an ethical perspective by developing an anticipatory ethical analysis of the implications for the use of CRISPR together with gene drive in humans.

Anticipatory Ethics and Governance (AEG): Towards a Future Care Orientation Around Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology (NT) presents significant challenges in terms of developing a regulatory framework. This is due to a lack of scientific knowledge about the behaviour of the technology in its interactions with biological and ecological processes, the environment and other technologies. Crucially, there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the potential environmental and human health and safety impacts of NT. Consequently, the development of NT is a potential test case for framing new models of ‘soft law’ voluntary governance as a substitute for traditional command and control type regulation. Driven by ‘new science governance,’ an approach based on a combination of ideas in anticipatory ethics, future-oriented responsibility, upstream public engagement and deliberation and theories of justice may offer a solution. The uniqueness of the approach can be found in the incorporation of anticipatory approaches via public participation and deliberation as the input into procedural justice approaches with distributional justice as the output. The overarching objective of this work is to contribute to the discussion in relation to the internalisation of responsibility and the building of intellectual and societal capacity to anticipate negative consequences before they arise in the hope that such an approach could be the antithesis of the retrospective imposition of responsibility and liability after the harm is done, which is the outcome of traditional regulatory and ethical approaches. Ultimately, the purpose is to contribute to the long-term sustainability of NT.

Emerging pervasive information and communication technologies (PICT): ethical challenges, opportunities and safeguards

This book provides a wide and deep perspective on the ethical issues raised by pervasive information and communication technology (PICT) small, powerful, and often inexpensive Internet-connected computing devices and systems. It describes complex and unfamiliar technologies and their implications, including the transformative potential of augmented reality, the power of location-linked information, and the uses of big data, and explains potential threats, including privacy invaded, security violated, and independence compromised, often through widespread and lucrative manipulation. PICT is changing how we live, providing entertainment, useful tools, and life-saving systems. But the very smartphones that connect us to each other and to unlimited knowledge also provide a stream of data to systems that can be used for targeted advertising or police surveillance. Paradoxically, PICT expands our personal horizons while weaving a web that may ensnare whole communities. Chapters describe particular cases of PICT gone wrong, but also highlight its general utility. Every chapter includes ethical analysis and guidance, both specific and general. Topics are as focused as the Stuxnet worm and as broad as the innumerable ways new technologies are transforming medical care. Written for a broad audience and suitable for classes in emerging technologies, the book is an example of anticipatory ethics ethical analysis aimed at influencing the development of new technologies (Deborah Johnson 2010). The growth of PICT is outpacing the development of regulations and laws to protect individuals, organizations, and nations from unintended harm and malicious havoc. This book alerts users to some of the hazards of PICT; encourages designers, developers, and merchants of PICT to take seriously their ethical responsibilities if only to do no harm before their products go public; and introduces citizens and policy makers to challenges and opportunities that must not be ignored.

Anticipatory Ethics for a Future Internet: Analyzing Values During the Design of an Internet Infrastructure

The technical details of Internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. This paper explores one method for practicing anticipatory ethics in order to understand how a new infrastructure for the Internet might impact these social debates. This paper systematically examines values expressed by an Internet architecture engineering team-the Named Data Networking project-based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. Networking engineers making technical choices also weigh non-technical values when working on Internet infrastructure. Analysis of the team's documents reveals both values invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities, such as efficiency and dynamism, as well as values, including privacy, security and anonymity, which stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. The paper considers the contextual and social origins of these values, and then uses them as a method of practicing anticipatory ethics: considering the impact such priorities may have on a future Internet.

The value and pitfalls of speculation about science and technology in bioethics: the case of cognitive enhancement

In the debate on the ethics of the non-medical use of pharmaceuticals for cognitive performance enhancement in healthy individuals there is a clear division between those who view "cognitive enhancement" as ethically unproblematic and those who see such practices as fraught with ethical problems. Yet another, more subtle issue, relates to the relevance and quality of the contribution of scholarly bioethics to this debate. More specifically, how have various forms of speculation, anticipatory ethics, and methods to predict scientific trends and societal responses augmented or diminished this contribution? In this paper, we use the discussion of the ethics of cognitive enhancement to explore the positive and negative contribution of speculation in bioethics scholarship. First, we review and discuss how speculation has relied on different sets of assumptions regarding the non-medical use of stimulants, namely: (1) terminology and framing; (2) scientific aspects such as efficacy and safety; (3) estimates of prevalence and consequent normalization; and (4) the need for normative reflection and regulatory guidelines. Second, three methodological guideposts are proposed to alleviate some of the pitfalls of speculation: (1) acknowledge assumptions more explicitly and identify the value attributed to assumptions; (2) validate assumptions with interdisciplinary literature; and (3) adopt a broad perspective to promote more comprehensive reflection. We conclude that, through the examination of the controversy about cognitive enhancement, we can employ these methodological guideposts to enhance the value of contributions from bioethics and minimize potential epistemic and practical pitfalls in this case and perhaps in other areas of bioethical debate.

Book Review: Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT)

For the reader, this arrangement provides plenty of actual or near-term scenarios and applications of pervasive (some would say ‘ubiquitous’) information and communication technology (PICT), before the moral rules and principles that could be applied to them are directly considered. But make no mistake about it: the consideration of normative issues is abundant in the earlier chapters, and this is a real strength of the book. The less philosophically-inclined reader could easily benefit from the consideration of the applications, and yet reject the later theoretical analyses. Likewise, the two concluding theoretical essays could stand alone as contributions to the ethics of IT. But the essays as a group are best read as an arranged narrative—one that considers the ethical dimensions of technologies, takes account of points of intersection through the book, and then elicits the rules and principles to address these dimensions. Pimple’s introductory first chapter gives a brief overview of each subsequent essay, and is a useful guide for the reader who may want to skim or skip around based on particular interests. In the introduction, he describes the uniting framework for the ethical inquiries to come as one of “anticipatory ethics”—which contains an expectation that work in ethics can influence emerging technologies and the socio-technical systems in which they are embedded. This is a laudable goal, but one wonders immediately if a family of technologies that is both emerging and pervasive—and overwhelmingly favored by world trends in global trade, consumerism, and the rhetoric of efficiency—can really be altered, significantly, by scholarship on ethics. In essence, the problem is that, by the

Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies

In this essay, a new approach for the ethical study of emerging technology ethics will be presented, called anticipatory technology ethics (ATE). The ethics of emerging technology is the study of ethical issues at the R&D and introduction stage of technology development through anticipation of possible future devices, applications, and social consequences. I will argue that a major problem for its development is the problem of uncertainty, which can only be overcome through methodologically sound forecasting and futures studies. I will then consider three contemporary approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies that use forecasting: ethical technology assessment, the techno-ethical scenarios approach and the ETICA approach, and I considered their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this critical study, I then present my own approach: ATE. ATE is a conceptually and methodologically rich approach for the ethical analysis of emerging technologies that incorporates a large variety of ethical principles, issues, objects and levels of analysis, and research aims. It is ready to be applied to contemporary and future emerging technologies

Are We Asking the Right Ethics Questions on Drug Shortages? Suggestions for a Global and Anticipatory Ethics Framework

In the AJOB target article, Rosoff (2012) presents ethics frameworks to ration drugs and outlines an allocation policy for drug shortages in the United States. While the proposed policy has internal validity, it requires an additional global health dimension to accommodate the reality of interdependencies between developed and developing countries in the supply and demand of medicines. The aim of our article is to address this facet by examining the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSIs) on medicines in a globally framed, context-emergent, and anticipatorymanner.Weunderscore thatmanyof the global ELSIs ondrug shortages are directly emergent from the actual context of postgenomics

Editorial [Towards an Ecology of Collective Innovation: Human Variome Project (HVP), Rare Disease Consortium for Autosomal Loci (RaDiCAL) and Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance (DELSA)

Keywords: Anticipatory ethics, Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance, DELSA, genomics without borders, global ethics and international development in pharmacogenomics, Human Variome Project, RaDiCAL, Rare Disease Consortium for Autosomal Loci

Vaccines of the 21st Century and Vaccinomics: Data-Enabled Science Meets Global Health to Spark Collective Action for Vaccine Innovation

OMICS: A Journal of Integrative BiologyVol. 15, No. 9 Special Issue: Vaccines of the 21st Century: Vaccinomics for Global Public HealthGuest Editor: Vural Ozdemir, M.D., Ph.D., DABCPEditorialVaccines of the 21st Century and Vaccinomics: Data-Enabled Science Meets Global Health to Spark Collective Action for Vaccine InnovationVural Ozdemir, Tikki Pang, Bartha M. Knoppers, Denise Avard, Samer A. Faraj, Ma'n H. Zawati, and Eugene KolkerVural OzdemirCentre of Genomics and Policy, Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.Search for more papers by this author, Tikki PangResearch Policy and Cooperation, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.Search for more papers by this author, Bartha M. KnoppersCentre of Genomics and Policy, Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.Search for more papers by this author, Denise AvardCentre of Genomics and Policy, Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.Search for more papers by this author, Samer A. FarajDesautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.Search for more papers by this author, Ma'n H. ZawatiCentre of Genomics and Policy, Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.Search for more papers by this author, and Eugene KolkerBioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis Laboratory and High-throughput Analysis Core, Seattle Children's Research Institute, Seattle, Washington.Predictive Analytics, Seattle Children's Hospital, Seattle, Washington.Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Education & Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Sep 2011https://doi.org/10.1089/omi.2011.03edAboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byUnderstanding the immunogenetics of human viral diseasesEthical and policy implications of vaccinomics in the United States: community members’ perspectives24 February 2021 | Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, Vol. 17, No. 7Genomics and infectious disease: a call to identify the ethical, legal and social implications for public health and clinical practice18 November 2014 | Genome Medicine, Vol. 6, No. 11Optimizing high performance computing workflow for protein functional annotation24 April 2014 | Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Vol. 26, No. 13Changing Face of Vaccination in Immunocompromised Hosts4 July 2014 | Current Infectious Disease Reports, Vol. 16, No. 9Agrigenomics for Microalgal Biofuel Production: An Overview of Various Bioinformatics Resources and Recent Studies to Link OMICS to Bioenergy and Bioeconomy Namrata Misra, Prasanna Kumar Panda, and Bikram Kumar Parida29 October 2013 | OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, Vol. 17, No. 11Integrative Analysis of Longitudinal Metabolomics Data from a Personal Multi-Omics Profile3 September 2013 | Metabolites, Vol. 3, No. 3Unraveling the Complexities of Life Sciences Data Roger Higdon, Winston Haynes, Larissa Stanberry, Elizabeth Stewart, Gregory Yandl, Chris Howard, William Broomall, Natali Kolker, and Eugene Kolker13 February 2013 | Big Data, Vol. 1, No. 1OMICS 2.0: A Practice Turn for 21st Century Science and Society Vural Özdemir9 January 2013 | OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, Vol. 17, No. 1Beyond ELSIsAre We Asking the Right Ethics Questions on Drug Shortages? Suggestions for a Global and Anticipatory Ethics FrameworkThe American Journal of Bioethics, Vol. 12, No. 1 Volume 15Issue 9Sep 2011 InformationCopyright 2011, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:Vural Ozdemir, Tikki Pang, Bartha M. Knoppers, Denise Avard, Samer A. Faraj, Ma'n H. Zawati, and Eugene Kolker.Vaccines of the 21st Century and Vaccinomics: Data-Enabled Science Meets Global Health to Spark Collective Action for Vaccine Innovation.OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.Sep 2011.523-527.http://doi.org/10.1089/omi.2011.03edPublished in Volume: 15 Issue 9: September 1, 2011Online Ahead of Print:August 17, 2011PDF download