NO SENSIBLE PERSON could favor irresponsible research and innovation. So RRI—“responsible research and innovation”—may sound like an innocuous idea. As it takes hold in Europe, though, the term has clearly become a cover for what amounts to a Luddites’ veto. Now the notion is percolating among American academics. If it finds its way to the halls of state, RRI would dramatically slow technological progress and perhaps even bring it to a grinding halt.
That wouldn’t be an unexpected byproduct. Several RRI proponents have explicitly argued for “slow innovation,” even “responsible stagnation.” One of them—Bernd Carsten Stahl, a professor of critical research in technology at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom—has even compared technological breakthroughs to a pandemic. “We should ask whether emerging technologies can and will be perceived as a threat of a similar level as the current threat of the Covid virus,” he wrote in 2020. If so, he added, they would require “radical intervention.”
AN OVERABUNDANCE OF CAUTION
BEFORE WE EXPLORE RRI, we should take a look at its precursor, a pernicious notion known as the precautionary principle. This concept is often summarized as “better safe than sorry”—but there’s a bit more to it than that.
In 1998, a group of environmentalists meeting at the Wingspread retreat center in Wisconsin hammered out the now more or less canonical version of the precautionary principle: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The so-called Wingspread Statement explicitly shifts the burden of proof, so that anyone proposing a new activity cannot proceed without showing that it will not—or, at least, is very unlikely to—cause significant harm. This amounts to a demand for trials without error.
Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky anticipated how such an idea would actually end up doing more harm. “An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards,” he wrote in his 1988 book Searching for Safety. “Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.”
But as misguided as it is, the precautionary principle is at least focused on preventing harms to health and the environment. In, three responsible research and innovation boosters—Richard Owen, René von Schomberg, and Phil Macnaghten—called RRI “a move from risk governance to innovation governance.” Two more proponents, Stevienna de Saille and Fabien Medvecky, put it more plainly in 2016: RRI, they wrote, focuses not just on an innovation’s health and environmental impact but its “impact on values, morals and social relations.”
