Social media. AI. Genetic engineering. Self-driving cars. Autonomous robots. What if hindsight was ahead of us, and we could at least have an idea of the social, behavioral and ethical implications of emerging technologies before they even existed?
If it sounds like science fiction, it sort of is. “Science fiction science” or “sci-fi-sci” is an idea put together by researchers Iyad Rahwan (from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany), Azim Shariff (from the University of British Columbia in Canada), and Jean-Francois Bonnefon (from the Toulouse School of Economics in France).
They describe it as a new process that attempts to apply the scientific method to technologies that are either being planned or are in the early phases of development.
Such predictions have been made in science fiction before, but outside of the genre, they have never been fully explored from a scientific perspective.
“Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched,” the researchers said in a study posted to the preprint server arXiv.
“[We use] experimental methods to simulate future technologies, and collect quantitative measures of the attitudes and behaviors of participants assigned to controlled variations of the future.”
Rahwan, Shariff, and Bonnefon suggest that using the scientific method to predict the effects of technologies that will likely surface in the near future (though what exactly the “near future” means can be hazy) will make their potential effects clearer to developers, consumers, and policymakers.
This unconventional approach has been met with skepticism, as experimental scientists understandably tend to question its validity. But the trio has pushed on.
