The responsible innovation of disruptive technologies

The contemporary digital innovation landscape is large-scale, pervasive and disruptive. Technologies are intertwined with everyday life and it is sometimes not possible to disentangle their desirable properties from their potentially unwelcome implications. Yet, given the capacity of new technologies to create social harms and generate ethical risks, it is extremely important that these implications are understood and can be managed appropriately. We use the lens of Responsible Innovation (RI) to explore how the implications of two emerging technologies, quantum computing and autonomous vehicles, can be understood through their development processes before their integration into society. We demonstrate why RI has particular importance when considering the development of emerging technologies which hold the potential to be disruptive of existing social and economic paradigms. When social transformations can be perceived but have not become reified, RI enables us to “step back”: to anticipate issues, and influence the trajectory of technological design processes to mitigate potentially unwelcome changes. In conjunction with this it also allows us to prepare social, policy and regulatory responses to minimise and problematic implications. Finally, RI allows us to unpack the notion of “disruptive technology” when attributed to a particular contextual development, and to elucidate how such disruption may emerge. Undoubtedly the technologies discussed will raise new social and policy challenges. Without effective intervention the response to these challenges is likely to be driven by economic interests. However, through RI, alternative futures are also possible. RI does not aim to predict the future but does aim to anticipate plausible, socially transformative outcomes, allowing for a well-considered and safer integration of technological advances into the fabric of society: even for those technologies that are considered disruptive.