Having spent a  few weeks looking at public engagement of science, and not being particularly impressed, a Nature article by ethicist Jens Clausen concerning Brain-Machine interfaces comes as a breath of fresh air. Unusually for an article on ethics, it deals with the facts and resists the temptation to imagine some kind of dystopian or utopian future which would throw up a whole slew of far more interesting and complex ethical issues.

Rather than getting worked up into a lather over the “Ethics of Killer Robots” (I’m not joking, this is a very serious issue for some members of one of the sub branches of nanofiction and I’m sure they’ll be in touch with me at some stage to castigate me for belittling them) Clausen concludes simply that

Brain–machine interfaces promise therapeutic benefit and should be pursued. Yes, the technologies pose ethical challenges, but these are conceptually similar to those that bioethicists have addressed for other realms of therapy. Ethics is well prepared to deal with the questions in parallel to and in cooperation with the neuroscientific research.

There, that solves the issue quite neatly, and hopefully we can all now get back to getting on with the future rather than worrying too much about the consequences of things that are yet to be invented, which is a pointless exercise. This is why.

James Burke had an interesting series in the 1970s called Connections which neatly explained how one technological breakthrough or societal change enabled another round of disruption. Now for us, looking back though history, it is quite obvious that the mechanisation of agriculture led to huge productivity improvements meaning that people could live in cities without starving to death and get on with things more interesting than tilling the soil, science, philosophy and literature for example. Now, what many of the public engagement projects attempt to do is to turn the process around and imagine what a piece of technology or science could grow into at some point in the future.

(As an aside, or perhaps a disclaimer, as an increasing part of my consultancy work is adding current trends to common sense via some rather complicated maths to put some well defined probabilities on various things occurring, I have to admit that not all futurologists are mad, or all technology predictions are fantastical.  However a disappointing number of predictions take a rather linear one dimensional view of technology and simply envisage ‘things’ being cheaper/faster/smaller without taking into account the way that ‘things’ are used or whether the underlying science will survive the quite extreme tests that both the free market and peer review will subject it to.)

Can anyone name a single case where any technology prediction over a period of more than ten years has been anywhere near correct? After all, shouldn’t we all have atomic powered flying cars by now and robot butlers. If I suggested that  it should have been possible to predict the invention of  mobile phones or the Internet on the basis of Michael Faraday‘s 1839 experiments most people would think I was barking mad, so it beats me why people think it rational that by observing a nanotechnologist fiddling about with a nanotube on a lab any conclusions about the effect of technology society and all its associated ethical baggage can be drawn.

Trying to predict what sort of societal changes that science will engender in ten or twenty years is pretty much totally impossible. Where I sit, in the middle of the City of London, most people will tell you, off the record and unfortunately over a beer these days rather than over a magnum of Krug, that really they don’t have a clue what will happen next week. So claiming to be able to predict the societal and ethical effects of a few bits of science is so ridiculous as to cause any reasonable sane person to suffer apoplexy at the thought of spending money on it.

And we thought the bankers were mad?

I spent the weekend discussing the various ways in which (nano)technology may be developed ‘responsibly’ which was, erm, quite interesting.  I have parenthesised the ‘nano’ as many of the fears weren’t particularly specific to anything nano, and I am still rather mystified by the various definitions of the word ‘responsible’  which I’m sure will keep the ethicists, philosophers and lexicographers busy for some time to come. I’ll return to this later.

While none of the fears voiced were particular novel, I was rather charmed by the innocent naiivety of the participants. The lay people, effectively people pulled off the streets with no knowledge of nanotechnology and then asked to bravely give an opinion on it, were perhaps the most open minded of the participants. During the course of the project they had been browsing the web, making up songs and producing plays about the perceived evils of nanotechnologies.  Despite all the time spent on Wikipedia learning about mind/machine interfaces were still willing to shake the hands of eminent nanotechnologists without any fear of being assimilated or contaminated by nanobots or nanoparticles.

As with most public engagement exercises, and there have been plenty, there was a realisation that technology is, in general, a good thing but can of course be used for a wide variety of purposes, not all of them beneficial to humanity. It was interesting that one of the fears is that we might slide into a kind of society which we don’t particularly want, but on the other hand I don’t remember much debate about the use of closed circuit TV, traffic cameras or councils popping  microchips in your dustbin, something that most people wouldn’t want but nonetheless are becoming increasingly commonplace, so perhaps it doesn’t matter what we want?  There were other fears raised as well, but the meeting reports will hopefully address these in a disinterested way and avoid the usual temptation to produce a report calling for things to be regulated/monitored/banned or have moratoria slapped upon them because that is what the people funding the project, in this case the EU, are perceived to want to hear.

What was almost shocking was the implied assumption, perhaps understandable among the lay people and but surprisingly also shared by the social scientists that because a scientist does something in a lab it will inevitably end up affecting society. It’s a little like assuming that everyone who picks up a pen to become Oscar Wilde, or anyone who picks up a guitar to inevitably become a rock star – nothing could be further from the truth and it was rather surprising that the whole process was based on the (false) assumption that science has any direct impact on society, because it usually doesn’t.

For any particular bit of science to have any impact is has to go through a number of gates and clamber over hurdles of ever increasing height and complexity. Science has its own checks and balances with publication and peer review, but most entrepreneurs will tell you that is almost trivial in comparison with actually getting that science onto the market, something that has to be done before it can have any effect. Let’s not forget that it was 1953 when the secrets of DNA were unravelled, yet genetic screening for more than a small number of diseases and characteristics is still prohibitively expensive. It was not the scientific discovery that changed society, but the development of methods of applying that knowledge, such as automated gene sequencing, and much of that was done in the commercial world.

Was it useful? Well perhaps from an intellectual point of view in the same way that an animated discussion over dinner, or even in a pub can be an interesting diversion. I also think it is useful for the science community to engage with the public and reflect on what we should be doing better to communicate what we do as well as how and why. What also struck me as rather odd, or perhaps just mind bogglingly stupid, was the idea of asking people who know about as much about nanotechnology as they do about credit default swaps to give an opinion on the subject to another bunch of people who also seemed to understood very little about the subject, especially as the project involved examining the link between two rather nebulous and undefined terms, ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsible.’  While I think I understand what is meant by nanotechnology, and even if the definitions used by other people may differ from mine we can at leat have a meaningful discussion, the idea of responsibility is inextricably bound up with ethics, which opens a whole new can or worms. Ethics aren’t something that can be defined, and are indeed a product of a number of things such as your political and religious views, your upbringing, the society you live in and your position in the society. As an example, someone in government planning may envisage a scenario where a certain number of civilian deaths is acceptable and see no real ethical problem, whereas the families of those civilians certainly would see a very big problem!

One of the jobs of social scientists is to wrestle with these poorly defined issues and find a way to tease out some patterns and perhaps draw some conclusions, but I’m unclear whether discussing ‘nanotechnology’ and ‘responsibility’ is any more useful than spending a few days discussing ‘walruses’ and ‘ice cream.’

My only involvement with social science was a couple of years of social geography, used as a sort of counterweight to the maths and physics at university, so what appears quite senseless to me may actually be something of great interest to a social scientist, and conversely what appears a rather fascinating and important financial instrument or bit of science to me may appear rather silly from another viewpoint and as a result I’m curious about what the the result of the exercise will be.

As far as I know, the result of all of this discussion will involve a short film and no doubt a lengthy report, but will there, or indeed can there ever be any conclusions or recommendations from this type of exercise?

I would like to elaborate more, but I have had  to be rather non specific as the organisers were rather put out by the idea of any of the information being garnered leaking out via twitter which apparently was ‘not on.’  A laptop displaying this page was rather peevishly produced to indicate that  if any hint of the top secret deliberations were to be emitted into cyberspace than ‘they’ would know about it and take some unspecified action. As every discussion was being digitally recorded and filmed, I was left wondering whether this was a contradiction that was only visible to me. Ironically one of the public fears most often voiced was that technology could lead to increased surveillance and a consequent loss of privacy!

Perhaps the weekend trip to Paris left me in a more philosophical mood, but I’ll be spending this weekend at an Experimental Deliberative Forum in Harrogate. Led by the Universities of Durham and Coimbra, the DEEPEN project “seeks to implement forms of collaborative design of new spaces of ethical deliberation where citizens, stakeholders, experts and decision?makers can meet, debate and deliberate on the dilemmas posed by emerging nanotechnologies.”

What this means in practice is that I’ll be spending some twenty four hours with a cross section of people trying to figure out what nanotechnologies mean for me, you and the rest of the worlds (hopefully).  Hopefully over the course of the debate I’ll learn more about how other people see my chosen field, and hopefully slay a few myths on their side. Just how our opinions change, and what conclusions we reach will be documented by the project and filmed with the aim of producing a short video of our deliberations.

Networs and time permitting, I’ll be tweeting a few of the key findings here.

Sensibly, the event begins with some drinks….