David Guston - Anticipatory governance of emerging nanotechnologies

 

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) is a Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) funded by the National Science Foundation (#0531194; $6.2M/5 years) to perform research, training and outreach on the societal aspects of emerging nanotechnologies. At the programmatic level, CNS-ASU pursues a suite of activities known collectively as "real-time technology assessment" (RTTA; Guston and Sarewitz 2002), which aims at building the capacity to address the societal aspects of emerging technologies "upstream," that is, before they have reified into more concrete products and networks of interests. At the strategic level, CNS-ASU pursues the development of "anticipatory governance" (Barben et al. 2008; Guston 2008), which aims at strengthening the capacities across society to anticipate (but not predict) emerging technologies, engage various publics over their values regarding those anticipated technologies, and integrate expertise and values through collaborations between the social sciences and the natural sciences and engineering. This talk will address the most recent developments at CNS-ASU at both the programmatic and strategic levels.