Hermeneutic technology assessment

Hermeneutic TA is a correction and extension to the classical, consequentialist TA approaches. Due to the lack of direct access to the future, it’s only possible to think about futures according to our present-day’s knowledge, our values, fears and expectations, our culturally shared assumptions of the future, and our ways of ‘constructing’ visions and other types of images of the future. Thus, the object of interest for a hermeneutic TA is not a future present (in the sense of a moment in time later than now), but present futures meaning current images of the future. In particular, this applies to futures relating to new and emerging sciences and technologies (NEST), so called Technofutures. In hermeneutic TA, Technofutures are investigated as objects created, disseminated, and contested in present time, in a specific socio-cultural context and under specific rules and codes. In this chapter, we introduce the approach of hermeneutic TA and discuss relations to related approaches such as the sociotechnical imaginaries.