Robert Braun
Assoc. Prof. Habil.
Senior Researcher, Deputy Head
Science, Technology and Social
Transformation
November 25th
@Masaryk University
2022/2023
Social
Responsibility:
Business,
Research and
Innovation
3
Learning outcomes and delivery
2
Technical/admin
issues
Learning outcomes:
- Have a general awareness of what the relationship of
technology and society
- Understand the concept of
o CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
o pCSR (Political Corporate Social Responsibility)
o STS (Science and Technology studies)
o SCOT (The social construction of technology)
o Sociotechnical imaginaries
o RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation)
- The relationship of these concepts to the philosophy of
science and sociology
- Understand the concept and methodology of social
phenomenology
- Have sufficient knowledge of different conceptualizations of
technology, of automobility, of research and innovation
- Have practice in theoretical argumentation, understanding
complex sociotechnical problems and conceptualizations.
3
Completion
Students will have to (a) do a
presentation; (b) write one academic
blog post and (c) a final course paper.
➢ Presentation: should reflect on a
current theme analyzed from a critical
responsibility point of view (15 mins);
➢ Academic blog: should reflect some
current sociotechnical challenge,
addressed via learnings acquired in
the course (250-500 words);
➢ Final paper: will address a specific
question within the realm of STS and
analyze it according to general
academic practice, based on literature
review and secondary research (but
not independent primary research)
(2500-3000 words).
Responsible Innovation
Session 1: Society, responsibility &
technology
10:00-11:30
Introduction, general concept, theme,
administrative issues
11:45:13:15
Business, Responsibility & Innovation
13:45-15:15
What is CSR/pCSR?
15:15:16:45
What is STS (Society and Technology
Studies)?
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Session 2: Responsibility &
Technology: the case of
automobility
10:00-11:30 Recap
11:50-13:20 Sociotechnical systems
13:20-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Automobility
15:45-16:45 Automobility violence
16:45-17:00 Wrap-up
Session 3: The future of technology
and society
9:00-10:15 Recap
10:15-11:20 Break
11:30-13:00 What is responsible research
and innovation?
13:20-14:50What would a post-car world
look like?
15:10-16:40
The trouble of artificial intelligence
16:40-17:00 Closing & summary
1. Recap
Business, Responsibility & Innovation
○ “[Engineers] are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world. By designing
and constructing new structures,
processes, and products, they are
influencing how we live as much as any
laws enacted by politicians. Would we
ever think it appropriate for legislators to
pass laws that could transform our lives
without critically reflecting on and
assessing those laws? Yet neither
engineers nor politicians deliberate
seriously on the role of engineering in
transforming our world. Instead, they
limit themselves to celebratory clichés
about economic benefit, national
defense, and innovation.”
Carl Mitcham: The True Grand Challenge for Engineering: Self-
Knowledge
➢ https://issues.org/perspectives-the-true-grand-challenge-for-
engineering-self-knowledge/
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Engineers as legislators
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 4408 2287
The 17th-century “Quest for Certainty”
○ a timely response to a specific historical
challenge-the political, social, and theological
chaos embodied in the Thirty Years' War;
○ Cartesian program for philosophy that swept
aside the "reasonable" uncertainties and
hesitations of 16th-century skeptics in I favor
of new, mathematical kinds of "rational"
certainty and proof;
○ Build a secure body of human knowledge
using "rationally validated" methods.
○ Framing basic theories around ideas whose
merits were clear, distinct and certain and
using only demonstrable arguments, having
the necessity of geometrical proofs.
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The (his)story of
responsibility
What is science?
Kjetil Rommetveit, Roger Strand, Ragnar Fjelland & Silvio
Funtowicz (2013). „What can history teach us about the
prospects of a European Research Area?” Ispra: JRC
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Thirty Years‘ war
Destitution and
devastation
Religious
conflicts
Insecurity of
knowledge
Disorder &
superstition
Witchcarft and
‘alternative’
knowledge
trajectories
➢ The grand book of the universe
written in the language of
mathematics.
➢ To avoid precipitancy and
prejudice, and to include
judgements nothing more than
what presented itself.
➢ Continual fear and danger of violent
death and the life of man solitary,
poor, nasty: covenants, without the
sword, are but words.
Science as ideology
Science as political hierarchy
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Innovation &
Responsibility
Key words:
✓ Giving back
✓ Strategic goals
✓ Cradle to cradle
✓ Management of impacts
➢ Innovation is generally conceived as the basis for
a competitive economy: to develop new market
segments, improve the quality of their products or
reduce the costs of production.
➢ A constant race for novelty and improvement only
those that constantly reinvent themselves and
their products can win. An innovation’s success is,
however, measured in terms of its uptake on the
market and its generation of economic profit for
the owner of the innovation. Societal benefit may
arise as positive externalities of innovation but are
not per-se decisive for action.
➢ Innovation management in companies is mostly
concerned with creating fruitful environments for
new ideas and deciding which of these ideas will
be pursued further and which are to be discarded.
How is (one) responsible?
• Do no harm
• Anticipate impacts
• Do good business
• Bring better solutions
• ….
10
What is STS?
It deconstructs processes and
terminologies of science in order to
help understand how science works,
both internally and within society at
large.
A large body of scholarly work has
examined historical, social,
technological, and political contexts
shaping different modes of scientific
inquiry and how scientific knowledge
is shaped and circulated in particular
places at particular times.
Science and Technology
○ is focused on organizations, networks,
and assemblages and approached
human and non-human actors. STS
considers how technology and society
co-produce each other.
11
STS on science as
politics
Scientific/engineering practices and methods
(data collection, sampling, calculating, charting
results, and modeling) are inscription
devices.
➢ They seem stable and graspable (or they
stabilize and grasp), but they
simultaneously may serve to erase the
complex materiality of the reality being
studied.
➢ Scientific knowledge is constructed not by
individual scientists or by science as such
but by specific established practices that
are widely accepted and practiced among
groups of scientists and institutions.
12
What is a
sociotechnical
system?
❖ The term socio-technical systems was originally
coined by Emery and Trist (1960) to describe
systems that involve a complex interaction between
humans, machines and the environmental aspects
of the work system.
❖ Technology plays an important role in fulfilling
societal functions
❖ Socio-technical systems consist of a cluster of
elements, including technology, regulation, user
practices and markets, cultural meaning,
infrastructure, maintenance networks and supply
networks
❖ Socio-technical systems are actively created,
(re)produced and refined by several social groups,
for instance, firms, universities and knowledge
institutes, public authorities, public interest groups
and users. These social groups have their own
vested interests, problem perceptions, values,
preferences, strategies and resources (money,
knowledge and contacts).
Automobility as sociotechnical system
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Automobility
The ill-named thing
John Urry
“A self-organizing autopoietic,
nonlinear system that spreads
world-wide, and includes cars, cardrivers,
roads, petroleum supplies
and many novel objects,
technologies and signs.”
Stephen Böhm,
et al
“A regime shaping and producing
new types of people consistent
with [its] logics.”
Katharina Mandersheid
“[A]n apparatus of dispersed and
decentralized power, which
consists of automobile landscapes,
discourses, formation governance
of specific subjectivities and
mobility practices.”
Braun & Randell
A political order: a world; one
example, constituent element,
manifestation, of the political ontology
of the late-Anthropocene.
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Multiple forms of
violence
Being in automobility
Physical
85 million dead & billions injured
that are referred to and analysed
as “accidents”
Slow
A violence that occurs gradually and out of
sight, of delayed destruction dispersed
across time and space, typically not viewed
as violence at all
Epistemic
Violence effaced and occluded; of
victims, bystanders, nonautomobilized
peoples
Ontological
The technoscientific actualization of settler
colonialism and of the modern “politics of
being” that had enabled it --“othering”
and the “enserfing” of non-automobilized
humans across the entire planet.
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16
The political ontology
of the accident
Quick artefact analysis
➢ Private document made public
➢ Main actor: the vehicle
➢ Non-human agents as “Circumstances”
➢ Bodies as vehicle-objects
➢ Human injury as yes/no options
➢ Animals not present
➢ …..
An “accident” is (created as) a mobile
sociotechnical event enacted in fixed timespace; a
collision creating agencyless (degraded) inanimate
bodies and humans endowed with agency.
The political constitution of humans and nonhumans
is the very creation of these entities
in terms of mobile human and non-human:
➢ Violence is constitutive of the „world“ of
automobility
➢ Entities therein are cyborgs (technosocial
assemblages) enduring or meting out
violence
➢ Violence is transformed into ontological
violence
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Graham
The politics of
automobility
2. What is responsibility
in innovation?
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❖ RRI is a transparent, interactive process by which
societal actors and innovators become mutually
responsive to each other with a view to the
(ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal
desirability of the innovation process and its
marketable products (in order to allow a proper
embedding of scientific and technological advances
in our society)
❖ Von Schomberg,Rene (2012)
❖ RRI implies that societal actors (researchers,
citizens, policy makers, business, third
sector organisations, etc.) work together
during the whole R&I process in order to
better align both the process and its
outcomes with the values, needs and
expectations of society.
❖ RRI is implemented as a package that includes
multi-actor and public engagement in R&I,
enabling easier access to scientific results, the take
up of gender and ethics in the R&I content and
process, and formal and informal science
education.”
(https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020section/responsible-research-innovation;
19.8.2020)
Responsible Research
and Innovation
“Taking care of the future through
collective stewardship of science
and innovation in the present.”
Stilgoe et al (2013) 19
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What is Responsible Research and Innovation in policy?
Importance of analytical and conceptual rigor
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The STS heritage
Academic criticism of RRI as policy
❖ Academic heritage of STS stemming from ELSA,
ethics, STS and technology assessment (Klassen et al.
2019).
❖ Importance of analytical and conceptual rigor and
less concerned with political and institutional viability
(RRI as a “policy artefact” Owen and Pansera 2019b:
3) and “policy-driven discourse” (Owen and Pansera
2019a: 26)
❖ “RRI keys have more to do with the bureaucracy of
maintaining the SwafS/RRI as a cross-cutting theme
than with the conceptual foundations of RRI” (Rip
2016: 292).
❖ As opposed to the normative, policy oriented ‘keys’
they emphasize four process dimensions: Anticipation,
Inclusion, Reflexivity and Responsiveness (AIRR,
(Stilgoe et al. 2013: 1570).
© Trilateral
Appadurai, Taylor, Jasanoff & Kim
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Social Imaginaries
“RRI implies that societal actors
(researchers, citizens, policy
makers, business, third sector
organisations, etc.) work together
during the whole R&I process in
order to better align both the
process and its outcomes with the
values, needs and expectations of
society.”
Social imagination
Collectively held,
institutionally stabilized,
and publicly performed
visions of desirable
futures, animated by
shared understandings of
forms of social life and
social order attainable
through, and supportive
of, advances in science
and technology.
Values, needs and
expectations
Social order
An organized field of social
practices as a key
ingredient in making social
order
Sociotechnical
Imaginaries
How to?
Doing responsibility
Plato
“Wherever you go, you will be
a polis”
Paul Fayerabend
R&I to be put under
democratic control
Richard Owen
R&I as part of democratic
political governance
Donna Haraway
Be response-able
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Responsibility
Stewardship of the future
24
○ Responsible Research and Innovation is a
transparent, interactive process by which
societal actors and innovators become
mutually responsive to each other with a view
to the (ethical) acceptability,
sustainability and societal desirability of
the innovation process and its marketable
products (in order to allow a proper
embedding of scientific and technological
advances in our society)
○ Von Schomberg,Rene (2012)
Response-ability
Becoming with others
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➢ (Enabling response) attention to the details of
a text;
➢ It is about taking what you find inventive and
trying to work carefully with the details of
patterns of thinking (in their very materiality).
➢ All the “re’s”, like “restoration”,
“reintroduction”, “rehabilitation”,
“remediation” must be taken as questions,
not answers.
➢ [You] need to confront the questions of
agency and responsibility, the violence of all
cuts (including “restorative” ones), and their
constitutive entanglements, with all the
associated ethical, epistemological, and
ontological implications of the reconfigurings
of spacetimemattering.
Karen Barad, Intra-active Entanglements
3. Presentations
Current theme analyzed from a critical
responsibility point of view (15 mins)
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Grading
27
➢ Group presentation grade (based on
➢ creativity,
➢ interactivity and
➢ depth of analysis
same for all group members.
➢ Individual grade for each member (based
on:
➢ presentation skills,
➢ enthusiasm
➢ ability to keep up the interest of fellow
students.
4. „Innovation“ in
automobility
a critical perspective
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○ Cradle-to-cradle
challenges/”sustainability”
○ Negative externalities/”awayism”
○ Private/public challenges/”inequality”
○ Automobile demographics
challenges/”Global north vs. global
south”
○ Violence challenges
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Electromobility
A neoliberal technology push
agenda?
?
○ Data challenges
○ Driver/safety challenges
○ Congestion challenges and miles travelled
○ Automobile demographics
challenges/”Global north vs. global south”
○ Violence challenges
30
Autonomous mobility
A new neoliberal technology push
agenda?
?
○ Data challenges
○ Spatial challenges
○ Inequality challenges
○ Congestion challenges
○ Violence challenges
31
Aeromobility
An even newer neoliberal technology
push agenda?
?
5. Artificial
Intelligence
a critical perspective
Arithmetic decision-making
Arithmetically controlled decision-making is a procedure in which decisions are
partly or completely delegated – via other persons or corporate entities – to
automatically executed decision-making models to perform an action.
Arithmetic decision-making
Used in:
• Categorizing unemployed (AMS)
• Manufacturing robots
• Autonomous vehicles
• Medical diagnostic systems, etc.
Socio-ethical challenges:
• Ethnic bias
• ‘Moral machine’
• ‘Trolley problem’
•. Unintended consequences
How to make ADM ‘better’?
How to make our ‘judgment better ‘ on when, why and how to delegate human
decisions to ADM?
A delegation problem
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Responsible AI
➢ Problem is not new -- no need to reinvent the
wheel;
➢ Human decision-making are complex setups of
personal, societal and cultural determinations
individualized by the context, personal
weighing of expected utility and a number of
biases and heuristics – no one solution, focus
on context and options;
➢ The principal-agent problem is not addressed
via assessing the epistemic qualities of the
agent, but by her intent to represent the
interests of the principal suitably – shift from
epistemology to politics;
➢ Principal side overconfidence as behavioral
bias is expected to be utility destructive – pay
attention to overconfidence, cf. taken-for-
grantedness.
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Responsible AI 2
➢Accountability: the need to explain and
justify decisions the AI makes and is ensured
if decisions are derivable from, and explained
by, the ADM used.
➢Responsibility the capability of AI systems to
answer for their decisions, to identify errors or
unexpected results. This also means the need
to link ADM to the fair use of data and to the
actions of stakeholders involved in the
system’s decision.
➢Transparency refers to the need to describe,
inspect and reproduce the mechanisms
through which AI systems make decisions and
learn to adapt to their environment, and to
the governance of the data used or created.
Summary
Robert Braun
+43159991134
braun@ihs.ac.at
http://www.ihs.ac.at/
Thank you