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America's relationship with technology has always been marked by excitement with an undercurrent of unease. We’re exhilarated by the powers granted by new machines and techniques, while remaining worried about their effects — on the economy, on the environment, on the society, on ourselves.
As the pace of innovation increases, so too does the scope of its repercussions. Familiar declarations of promise and risk are evoked by artificial intelligence and robotics, Big Data, automated cars, drones, fracking, virtual reality, nuclear power, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and pretty much everything involving the Internet.
Given this inherent duality, we’d like to think that somebody’s watching to make sure we capitalize on the good things offered by new technologies while avoiding the bad. But is that the case? Is anyone minding the store?
As it turns out, a lot of people are. In fact, alongside the explosion of new technologies over the past 20 years has come a conspicuous flowering of the discipline known as technology assessment. The term describes the attempt to understand what the economic, social, and environmental effects of new technologies might...