Incorporating Ethics Into Technology Assessment

Despite concerns about a slowdown in technological innovation-as expressed recently by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the economist Tyler Cowen, and others-humankind is poised to make transformational scientific and technological strides in the coming years. Driverless cars are being tested in major American cities. SpaceX is building a low-cost space-based internet service. Artificial intelligence, though falling short of the general humanlike intelligence of science fiction, is becoming useful in addressing complex tasks, including diagnosing cancer and live translation. Some innovations are also bringing intense controversy, such as the twin babies born in China who had their genes edited to make them (and their offspring) resistant to HIV. The researcher, He Jiankui, did so using a technique only discovered in 2012. Technology may not be advancing as quickly as it could be, but it is still advancing rapidly, and not just in the digital sphere. Although technological innovation can bring enormous benefits in material well-being, new technologies can also create social and economic disruptions, national security risks, and ethical dilemmas-all of which raise complex questions that democratically elected representatives must be prepared to consider soberly. For instance, advances in gene editing may lead to the amelioration of debilitating diseases, but also to the possibility of designer babies, do-it-yourself biohacking, and new forms of bioterrorism. The conventional wisdom is that law and policy lag behind advances in new technology-a gap that has only widened in recent years. If the mantra of Silicon Valley is "move fast and break things," Congress's might well be "move slowly and ignore things." Congressional inaction has created some messy situations, particularly where there is a lack of clarity about the scope of agency authority, or when states move to fill a gap left at the federal level. Federal inaction has stalled policy debates over issues such as autonomous vehicles, digital privacy, and cybersecurity, to name a few. The result is uncertainty that unnecessarily delays the benefits of new innovations, undermines America's global competitiveness, and obscures consideration of how legitimate harms and ethical questions can be addressed.A key challenge in the coming years will be: How can the nation better equip policy-makers to understand the implications of new innovations? Beyond the technical details, how can we improve the way in which the