Technological Understanding and Ethics Readiness of Technology
Eline de Jong

Samenvatting:

Quantum technologies form an emerging group of technologies that harness the principles of quantum mechanics. Motivated by the ambition to do things right from the start, an ethical discussion is emerging around these technologies. Such early-stage or ‘upstream’ ethics comes with two epistemic challenges: gaining an understanding of a novel technology, and navigating the uncertainties surrounding its development. This thesis develops two concepts that elucidate these challenges and offer tools to navigate them: an account of technological understanding, illuminating what it means to understand technology, and the notion of ethics readiness, informing which ethical questions are best asked when.

Strictly speaking, a first generation of quantum technologies is already up and running. This includes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), lasers, and transistors. Now a second generation of quantum technologies is emerging, leveraging actively controlled quantum phenomena for measuring physical data (quantum sensing), performing computational tasks (quantum simulation and computing), and transmitting information (quantum communication). It is this second generation that this thesis focuses on as an illustrative case of ethical engagement with new and emerging technologies. While their stages of development diverge, second-generation quantum technologies share the promise of enabling a wide range of applications across multiple fields – from breakthroughs in the sciences with implications for, for example, the energy transition, to optimising complex logistics and GPS-independent navigation, and from providing novel ways of securing communication to breaking current encryption methods. This promising character, together with the breadth of potential applications, invites ethical engagement: what ethical questions do these technologies raise? 

Before turning to that question, this thesis takes a step back to reflect on what enables meaningful engagement with technology in the first place. ‘Meaningful’ is here understood as ethical discussion grounded in technological reality, focusing on questions that directly arise from what the technology is and may do, to the best of our understanding. Ensuring such groundedness is especially pertinent in the case of new and emerging technologies, given their specific epistemic context: they present us with novel technological capabilities while coming with profound uncertainties surrounding their development. The epistemic conditionality of technology ethics – the idea that ethical engagement with technology is conditioned by epistemic factors – has received relatively little systematic attention. Neglecting the epistemic conditions of meaningful ethical discussion, however, leaves room for misguided and premature questions that lack grounding in what a technology actually is or may do. To address this gap, this thesis asks:
  What are the epistemic conditions of meaningful ethical engagement with technology?

In other words, what do we need to have a grounded discussion about the ethical aspects of a new technology? To investigate this, the thesis zooms in on the twofold epistemic challenge of the ethics of new and emerging technologies: coming to grips with a novel technology, and navigating the deep uncertainties surrounding its development. 

The first challenge points towards the need to develop an understanding of the technology. In the absence of a philosophical account of what understanding means in relation to technology, the following sub-question was posed:
  What does understanding mean in relation to technology, and which form of understanding best enables meaningful ethical analysis?

The first part of the thesis addresses this question and develops an account of technological understanding and its relevance to ethics. Chapter 2, A Conception of Technological Understanding, lays the theoretical groundwork. Drawing on the notion of scientific understanding, technological understanding is defined as a cognitive skill that is involved whenever we engage with technology. More precisely, it entails the ability to recognise how to use a technological artefact to achieve a practical aim. The account highlights the epistemic dimension of engaging with technology, arguing that any form of successful engagement – whether building it, practically using it, or devising new applications – requires a certain degree and type of understanding. What degree and type depends on the context. To illustrate this, technological understanding is specified for one foundational context: design. Within design, technological understanding amounts to the ability to design a technological artefact capable of realising a predefined aim.

Chapter 3, A Contextual Approach to Technological Understanding, further develops this contextual character by specifying technological understanding for two further contexts. In the context of operation – in which a technology is practically used – technological understanding entails the ability to recognise how to operate a technological artefact to achieve an aim. In the context of innovation – in which new applications are being devised – it amounts to the ability to recognise a technology’s fit for purpose and envision its successful deployment. Together, these three contexts – design, operation, innovation – represent the main forms of engagement with technology. Each context requires the technology to be intelligible in different ways. The designer needs to grasp the technology’s inner workings; the operator its direct consequences; the innovator its functional capabilities. Rather than treating degrees of understanding as varying along a single scale on which some people simply score higher than others, this pluralistic and contextual picture recognises distinct forms of understanding suited to distinct practices, providing a more precise basis for determining which type of understanding is required in a given situation.

Chapter 4, Technological Understanding and Ethics, argues that technological understanding is also crucial for ethical engagement with technology. Being ultimately concerned with what a technology does in the world – how it may be used, by whom, for what purposes, and with what consequences – ethics requires grasping a technology’s potential uses and applications. This is provided most directly by the type of understanding linked to the innovation context: grasping what the technology is capable of and what it may be used for. Such ‘functional’ technological understanding offers a direct basis for tracing potential impact and identifying ethical stakes. The claim here is one of relevance rather than exclusivity: functional understanding is essential for meaningful ethical engagement, though other types may also illuminate ethically relevant aspects.

Together, these three chapters answer the central question of the first part of this thesis. They argue that understanding a technology means being able to recognise how to use it to realise an aim. Any form of engaging with technology involves this cognitive skill. Ethical engagement, too, requires it. The contextual character of technological understanding, however, highlights that different contexts require that the technology is intelligible to one at different quantitative and qualitative levels. For ethical purposes specifically, recognising how a technology may be used is essential. It is functional understanding, rather than technical or operational understanding, that most directly provides such insight.

This applies directly to quantum technologies, where introductions for non-experts often focus on the underlying physics rather than the functions. The account of technological understanding developed here provides a basis for redirecting such efforts and, more broadly, for underscoring the importance of understanding quantum technologies as a precondition for meaningful ethical engagement with them.

The second part of the thesis shifts the attention to the other epistemic challenge of the ethics of new and emerging technologies: dealing with the profound uncertainties surrounding their development. At an early-stage of development, much is still unknown – whether the technology will materialise, how it will be used, and with what consequences. Yet early-stage ethical engagement has a clear incentive: a technology that is still taking shape offers many entry points for intervention, making upstream engagement an effective way to steer downstream consequences. This tension is captured by the Collingridge dilemma: early in the innovation process there is still ample possibility to intervene, yet limited knowledge about what to intervene on; as the technology matures, this knowledge grows but the possibilities for effectively directing its development narrow. While many methods have been developed for ethical analysis of early-stage technologies, an overarching framework that accounts for the fact that the epistemic situation is not static but evolving, remains lacking. It is therefore unclear when which approach to ethics is best suited. This motivates the second sub-question of this thesis:
  How should we calibrate our ethical engagement to what is – and is not yet – understood about a technology?

Chapter 5 directly responds to this question. It develops the notion of ethics readiness to indicate that a technology allows for different types of ethical scrutiny at different stages of its development. Ethics readiness thus does not reflect a technology’s ethical acceptability or the presence of adequate governance structures, but its readiness for specific types of ethical questions. Two main types are distinguished: approaches that focus on the attribution of meaning to a technology – scrutinising how it is envisioned and by whom – and approaches that focus directly on its implications, assessing potential outcomes. These approaches deal with uncertainty differently: the meaning-oriented approach shifts focus from the future technology to present ideas about it, while the outcomes-oriented approach directly engages with potential futures and their implications.

The chapter argues that the appropriateness of these methods shifts as a technology matures and its epistemic context changes. In other words, the ethics readiness of a technology evolves along with technological development. Drawing on this idea, a framework is proposed that guides which ethical questions are best asked when. The meaning-oriented approach is best suited to deal with the profound uncertainties at the earliest stages of development, whereas the outcomes-oriented approach risks speculative overreach. As the technology further develops and takes shape more concretely, the outcomes-oriented approach gains both feasibility and relevance. The ethics readiness framework thus links the appropriateness of ethical approaches to a technology’s epistemic context.

Applied to quantum technologies, the framework suggests a different approach for quantum sensing and for quantum computing and communication, accounting for their different of development: quantum sensing being already operational, while computing and communication remain largely conceptual and early experimental. While quantum sensing may thus be ready for outcomes-oriented ethics, quantum computing and communication are best approached through meaning-oriented ethics. 

Chapter 6 takes up this implication. It adopts a meaning-oriented approach to the ethical analysis of quantum computing. It does so by examining the visions of key actors in the quantum computing ecosystem, asking how they envision the future of this technology. Based on an empirical analysis of their communications about what quantum computing will be and do, four main visions emerge. Each of them frames quantum computing as a powerful tool that will bring about change, yet situate this change in different domains: as an effective contributor to societal benefit, as a groundbreaking scientific tool, as an important economic asset, and as a strategic geopolitical advantage.

Scrutinising these visions from an ethical perspective reveals several issues warranting attention: a pervasive techno-optimism paired with technosolutionist reasoning; promissory language used to legitimise innovation agendas; and a discourse shaped by the interests of a relatively narrow group of powerful actors. If anything, these findings highlight the risk of a discourse dominated by a narrow elite, and the importance of opening it up to broader societal scrutiny and debate about the values and priorities guiding quantum development.

Chapter 7 takes up one of the flagged issues: technosolutionism. It identifies the phenomenon of Quantum for Good – the aspiration to mobilise quantum technologies for societal benefit – as exhibiting a technosolutionist logic: presenting technology as an effective solution to social problems. So understood, technosolutionism is not inherently problematic. Yet it does carry ethical risks, primarily by backgrounding alternatives and obscuring morally relevant aspects of the problem a technosolution seeks to address. This chapter argues that assessing the ethical acceptability of technosolutionist approaches requires scrutinising the construction of the problem, its sociopolitical dimensions, the impact of the proposed solution, and the plausibility of its claimed effectiveness.

Assessed against these criteria, the technology-first orientation of Quantum for Good carries a real risk: social challenges may be reframed in narrow, technically tractable terms, depoliticising inherently political questions and marginalising more effective alternatives. While Quantum for Good is laudable in its commitment to socially engaged innovation, it must attend to the limits of technological fixes and acknowledge the social and political dimensions of the challenges it seeks to address – if it aspires to be more than a moral veneer for existing innovation agendas.

Chapter 8, examines a ‘quantum for bad’ scenario: the potential of a full-scale quantum computer to break widely used encryption methods, posing an unprecedented cyber security threat. This scenario embodies the most tangible and potentially urgent ethical implication of quantum computing. However, a full-scale quantum computer capable of materialising this threat does not yet exist and its feasibility is not uncontested. This situation challenges the ethics readiness framework developed in Chapter 5, which would suggest that an outcomes-oriented approach is premature at this stage of quantum computing’s development. Yet waiting for the technology to mature sufficiently may foreclose effective anticipatory interventions. The chapter therefore asks under what conditions engaging with potential outcomes can be justified, even when the ethics readiness framework would deem this premature.

The chapter argues that outcomes-oriented ethical engagement is justified when the claimed risk can be made sufficiently plausible – that is, when there is adequate grounding for treating a speculative development as a genuine threat warranting ethical attention. Establishing this plausibility then raises a further question: when is precautionary action ethically defensible in response to such a risk? The chapter argues that this requires not only a plausible risk claim but also a compelling precautionary response; one that can be shown to be both effective and proportionate given the costs and uncertainties involved. The quantum cyber security case satisfies both conditions. The analysis provides the dominant narrative with a more ethically robust grounding, and by making its underlying assumptions explicit, it opens them up to broader contestation and scrutiny.

Together, the chapters of the second part show how ethical engagement with early-stage technologies can take shape while taking seriously the uncertainties that surround their development. The applied chapters also directly contribute to the emerging discussion on the ethical aspects of quantum technologies, and quantum computing in particular.

While prompted by the emergence of quantum technologies, this thesis engages with challenges that any ethical engagement with new and emerging technologies faces: coming to grips with a novel technology and navigating the profound uncertainties surrounding its development. Meaningful ethical engagement hinges on addressing both, focusing on issues that gain their relevance and urgency from a grounded understanding of what the technology is and can plausibly be expected to do. The conceptual tools of technological understanding and ethics readiness help guide such engagement and illuminate what it means to ask the right questions at the right moment.