The UK government has stated its commitment to making our country a science and technology superpower, a hub for industry and an ecosystem for innovation. We have increased life sciences finance twelvefold since 2012 and £250m has recently been dedicated to research in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and engineering biology. All of this is aimed at securing the UK’s place as a global leader in these three areas. While these advances in research and technology present great opportunities for the health and wellbeing of our nation, they can also raise significant social and wellbeing implications. They can exacerbate health inequalities and widen economic divides.
For a policymaker grappling with complex trade-offs, surveying ethical implications can offer a way to make choices that will create a better and more equitable experience for all. This is why the Nuffield Council on Bioethics is working alongside a cross-section of experts in our sector and a handful of civil servants to co-design tools to help policymakers embed ethics into their decision-making processes.
Anticipating techno-social trends through a process of horizon scanning (HS) and foresight is important for policymakers aiming to promote innovation in a responsible, sustainable, inclusive and fair way. Civil servants are well supported through the Government Office for Science, who offer training and resources to help teams understand and use the methodologies that underpin future thinking. However, the methodologies for foresight that are currently available don’t offer a systematic anticipation of ethical issues linked to emerging technologies. In-depth application of these approaches has often only been used in academic settings. They need to be adapted for a policymaking context.
For several months we have been speaking to civil servants who either lead on the foresight function for their team or are the customers of the insights it generates. We wanted to better understand the methods they commonly use, the time they dedicate and whether they experience any barriers, perceived or otherwise. Our conversations told us that while there was a desire to include ethical considerations, there was also an assumption that it would take more time than they had. There was also some disagreement as to where in the process ethical reflection would be of most benefit. Some believed ethics could help to frame their work from the start, while others felt they should have ethics as a filter at the end.
“While there was a desire to include ethical considerations, there was also an assumption that it would take more time than they had”
Alongside our conversations across Whitehall, we have consulted with HS and foresight experts working in think tanks, lobbying groups and research institutions to assess the current thinking around how ethical considerations could be better woven into foresight methods. This confirmed that it is complex, messy and cannot be a simple tick-box exercise. Diversity of voice is key, and it does take time if you want to be thorough and robust in your analysis.
Bringing all of this together, it’s clear to us that the constraint of time is something we need to confront and explore further. As such, we have identified three foresight approaches that vary in their time demands, are commonly used by policymakers, and could be adapted to become more ethically centred.
The first builds upon Health Impact Assessments (HIAs). HIAs are designed to evaluate the potential public health effects – both positive and negative – of a policy before it is finalised and implemented. They are common practice and generally, our insights suggest, well regarded. There are multiple ways to approach an HIA, but they are usually concise and there are examples that are not hugely time consuming. As such, we believe there would be benefits for us to develop an HIA template that considers the ethical impacts of innovation policies in more depth.
The second approach is specific to the use of ethical considerations in the development and future-proofing of regulation. A “regulatory sandbox” is a tool that assesses how a new product is likely to perform and what regulatory concerns could be considered before it reaches the marketplace. A sandbox can come in a myriad of shapes and sizes, but there is some common ground shared between them. Also, the time it takes to use them appears to be workable within current system pressures. This is why we have decided to work on creating an “ethically sensitive” sandbox for use by regulators.
The third approach seeks to spark moral imagination in future thinking. We have been working with associate professor Federica Lucivero who has previously published work showing the insights from using bespoke techno-ethical scenarios to assess emerging technologies. We are working with Federica and colleagues in the Ada Lovelace Institute to expand upon her work and translate it into tools that support moral deliberation within scenario workshops. This is likely to be the most time-consuming approach, but as scenarios are a recognised way to work we think there is benefit to us providing guidance on how to build more ethical reflections into this process.
We must all recognise that HS and foresight do not give us the ability to predict the future or find a definite answer. There will always be uncertainties. But currently, with ethical considerations not being the focus of available methodologies, we believe policymakers are at a disadvantage when they need to balance the difficult trade-offs that new innovations can induce. If they had HS and foresight approaches that enabled deeper exploration of ethical challenges and opportunities, we think the optimal choices could be easier to spot.
We hope the ethically centred horizon scanning and foresight tools and approaches we develop will be of value to people working both within the UK government and outside it. Because at the end of the day, if we can find ways to better embed ethics into our decision-making, we all stand to benefit.
Danielle Hamm is director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She was previously associate director of campaigns and policy at the charity Rethink Mental Illness