Research aim: adding a systems-dynamics approach

The moral dimension apparently is not the only relevant dimension in the assessment of new technologies and in the ascription of responsibility for the (possible) effects of these new technologies. This is even more so because the actual development of new technologies takes place, typically, in socio-technological environments, i.e., in contexts in which the social and the techno-logical domain intimately interact. Technotechno-logical innovations, for instance, generally involve many different actors – ranging from high-level regulators to

35 ‘When we can still make changes to the technology, one lacks the information about effects which only the introduction and use of the technology in society could provide, but at the moment that the technology has been introduced in society and information about its effects and morally salient characteristics starts to become available, it is often very hard to still make changes’ (Van den Hoven: 2014, 6).

36 ‘Results [of applied ethics research] were sometimes delivered at such a late stage in the development of the issues that it could no longer usefully be employed to make a difference’

(Van den Hoven: 2014, 6).

concepts from safety and system dynamics

micro-level scientists and end users – that can be highly interrelated. From the dynamic interplay between these actors and their system levels, multiple path-ways for innovative processes can emerge. In these kinds of environments the creation of new technologies and the actual attribution of responsibility can be considered as active and societally embedded processes. These processes, obviously, can include all kinds of complex social and socio-technological dy-namics and nuances (i.e., ‘messy’ details) that should be empirically investigated.

Indeed, the value sensitive design literature, a subset of the literature on respon-sible innovation that was once initiated by Friedman (1996) seems to confirm the value of this empirical dimension: ‘The desired normative and ethical purchase of the research needs to draw upon an analysis of the problems that is empirically informed by a number of other disciplines’ (Van den Hoven: 2014, 7). Others have confirmed this as well. So as to include both concrete contexts and ethical reflections in assessments Grunwald, for instance, suggested that:

‘Responsible Innovation … requires inter- and trans-disciplinary ap-proaches. In particular, a cooperation of applied ethics addressing the moral dimension, philosophy of science taking care of the epistemic di-mension and social science (STS) researching the social and political dimension as well as governance issues is needed.’ (Grunwald: 2011, 12)

While such cooperation might provide some clues in the abstract, it may not provide much concrete guidance on how to integrate normative and empirical viewpoints in responsible innovation. Bringing in an STS approach (from the Science, Technology and Society literature) does suggest, for instance, that the social and the technological domain should be studied together, but this in itself is not very informative on how this can be done, especially if it is supposed to support moral inquiry. This paper aims, therefore, to provide some guidance for how researchers could address the empirical – real-life – dimension, so as to further the concept of responsible innovation. It will focus thereby on large-scale socio-technological contexts in particular, since innovations tend to emerge from these kinds of contexts. More specifically, this paper will argue, through a series of recent studies on the safety of technologies in large-scale socio-technological military systems (Bakx and Richardson: 2013; Bakx and Nyce: 2012b, 2013b, 2015, forthcoming), that the concept of responsible innovation could benefit from a focus on socio-technological system dynamics.

A focus on socio-technological system dynamics as proposed here could fur-ther actual applications of responsible innovation, as such a focus can help to make sense of empirical data in large-scale socio-technological systems. Because of this, it would have the potential to better inform ethical reflections on (future) innovations. This, in turn, could help to identify and assess the effects that new technologies can have in real-life large-scale socio-technological contexts. Also, it could lead to more just distributions of responsibility in these settings. Especially the issues ‘path dependency’ and ‘distributed agency’, the issues that have been derived here from such a systems dynamical focus on responsible innovation, can improve, it will be argued, the early warning function that responsible innovation aims for. Both path dependency and distributed agency would, above all, impel to include a notion of collective socio-technological action into the attribution of responsibility to people involved in innovations. Such a notion would enable one to consider the complexities of the socio-technological contexts that these people have to deal with in actual settings.

The technologies that have been studied in the military for aspects of safety included existing technologies such as conventional helicopters, other existing artefacts such as an operational risk management tool, and future technological concepts, in this case the full integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the (inter)national airspace (Bakx and Richardson: 2013; Bakx and Nyce: 2012b, 2013b, 2015, forthcoming). These military-systems studies are helpful here as both analyses of existing and future technologies can add, of course, to our understanding of innovation processes. Also, safety is a key value in responsible innovation, as well as a typical example of a ‘thick concept’ (Möller: 2012), exemplifying thereby the intertwined elements of social-moral evaluative and technical aspects inherent in responsible innovation. Furthermore, although the studies are all on military topics, they explicate as well the concepts and princi-ples of socio-technological systems in general, which is why it seems legitimate to extend insights gained in these studies to other domains. It seems credible, therefore, that the military-systems studies can make a contribution to the responsible innovation literature. The next section, therefore, discusses these studies and what came out of them. Also, case material from these studies has been used, throughout this paper, for illustrative purposes.

concepts from safety and system dynamics