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Introduction: The Ups and Downs of New Technologies
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Technology analyst Pat Mooney suggests that most waves of new technologies "have a crest and a trough. The rich ride the crest, the poor stay in the trough". "The poor often haven't simply lost by comparison", he added. "They have lost in real terms". Even with the dot.com industries in the US during the 1990s, "the gap between rich and poor widened within the US," says Mooney.
While many technological innovations have improved the lives of those who could afford them, others have either directly harmed people's health, livelihoods and environment or led to further polarisations between the haves and have-nots in society.
Governmental use of 'science-based' and 'evidence-based' policy in the UK, Europe and the US often conveniently allows politicians whose decisions turn out to be flawed to deflect responsibility for failures onto previous technical assessments. The trend away from politically accountable judgements, and towards using scientific explanations to justify policy, has become institutionalised in governments and corporations. This top-down system of knowledge creation and the exclusive ownership of its products through patents has also imposed an artificial distinction between scientific investigation and analysis on one side and evaluation by non-specialists on the other.
The question of whether citizens should have a greater say in how new technologies are developed and deployed has only recently moved up the political agenda. The widespread rejection of technologies such as genetically modified crops, the response to HIV/AIDS, the debate over climate change and the new technologies of nano-scale science, have made the democratisation of technology the subject of debate by policy-makers in the UK and around the world.
NanoJury UK draws on an emerging consensus among individuals and organisations that a better balance needs urgently to be achieved between the advantages of many new products and technologies and the insights that women and men bring though their existing know-how.
The basic claim of the new consensus is that technologies can only work for people if these people are allowed to play an integral part in their development and application. Recent editorials in influential scientific journals, initiatives by key figures in scientific academies, and feedback from coal-face scientists suggest that there is already widespread enthusiasm for such an approach.
As people and organisations search for solutions to the great challenges of this century - from global hunger to energy production and HIV/AIDS to urban pollution - the need for democratic accountability in scientific research and technological innovation is more urgent than ever before. The speed of technological change, combined with the increasing distance between policy-makers and those on whose behalf they make decisions, creates huge challenges for attempts at democratisation.
Many individuals and organisations are now exploring new ways of winning citizens a greater say over how and which new technologies are developed. We hope that the NanoJury initiative will be a useful contribution to these efforts.