New vistas for technology and risk assessment? The OECD Programme on Emerging Systemic Risks and beyond

This paper presents a framework for understanding risk from the perspective of technological innovation and change. Special focus is put on systemic technological change, which tends to affect several dimensions of society at the same time. By drawing on innovation theory, and exemplifying by reference to the OECD futures project on Emerging Systemic Risk, the article elaborates a framework for technology assessment where the central elements are ubiquitous technological change and risk. Several key dimensions for technology assessment of this kind are identified, including increased mobility of people and goods, magnitude and concentration of humans, the speed and depth of change in the risk landscape, public to private shifts in the ‘ownership’ of risk, and the role played by expectations and perception to risk. The article ends with suggesting a number of new norms for risk and technology assessment coupled with new risk methodologies for further investigation.