בין סיכון לאי-ודאות: ידע, מדע וטכנולוגיה

Two extreme views about technology can be represented by the opposing camps of liberation and enslavement. For the liberation camp, technology can be seen as generating various ‘freedoms from’ and ‘freedoms to’, as well as a means to effectively monitor governments and increase participatory democracy. On the other hand, the enslavement camp sees technology as out of control, an endangerment to democracy, and a force against freedom. For some of the various political attitudes of this spectrum, different technological advances carry with them a wide range of promises for the improvement of human life and society, but on the other hand, for other political attitudes warning voices which raise alarm from the various risky and dangerous uses of technology. In this manner, each technology has those who support it and those who oppose it.
The first part will briefly present my thesis, which evaluated a variety of organizations for possible technological risks. Beginning with a typology of technological risks, a few examples of politically-disputed technologies and extreme political positions towards them will be given and discussed. An analysis of a specific technology through the prism of four mainstream techno-political attitudes will conclude this part. The second part will present a novel framework for the analysis of technology that is built upon various concepts and methods of Social Epistemology, STS, Social Construction of Technology, and Philosophy of Technology. Through its prism, the epistemic concept of trust regarding technologies will be briefly presented in a democratic context. Focusing on the societal requirements to raise the levels of trust in technologies, the question of which of the political attitudes, as presented in the first part, this account of trust would fit, will be raised.