Technological Innovation
Technological innovation has been a leading agent of social change, worldwide, since the late 1700s, serving as the conduit into society of developments in science and technology. As such, it has been at the center of ethical issues ranging from the morality and justice of the early Industrial Revolution to the consequences of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence (AI). In spite of its extraordinarily high social visibility, however, innovation is almost universally misunderstood and misrepresented, typically as synonymous with invention. Invention, in turn, is presented as a value-free, hence ethically neutral, application of new or existing technical knowledge. Treating innovations as inventions implies that ethical issues associated with their implementation derive not from factors intrinsic to innovations, but from how society chooses to implement them. Such an interpretation frees innovators from moral responsibility for the ethically problematic consequences of their activities, as well as buffering these activities from public assessment.
What Innovation Is
Innovation is a social process in which technical knowledge and inventions are selectively exploited on behalf of (corporate or government) institutional agendas driven by marketplace values or political policies. Inventions, and more broadly scientific and engineering expertise, are merely raw materials for technological innovation, which is the value-laden, ethically provocative process that determines whether an invention is introduced into a society, the form in which it is introduced, and the direction of its subsequent development as society responds to the innovation.
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