Structural methodological challenges in the ethics of socially disruptive technologies: Ecosystem-level assessment and wicked problems

Existing methodologies in technology ethics predominantly take individual technologies, applications, or artefacts as their primary unit of analysis, treating technology as a relatively well-defined and discrete object of evaluation. However, such approaches are structurally inadequate for the assessment of socially disruptive technologies (SDTs), whose most (morally) significant impacts frequently emerge from the dynamic interaction, co-evolution, and mutual reinforcement of multiple technologies within a socio-technical landscape. These impacts may not be visible at any individual level of technology evaluation and may not be subsumed from the evaluation of those levels in isolation, but may rather be emergent ecosystem-wide impacts of the SDT. Adequately capturing the emergent impacts of SDTs thus requires adopting an ecosystem approach to the ethics of SDTs, recognising the socio-technical ecosystem of intertwined technologies as a distinct level of ethical assessment in its own right. This raises additional methodological challenges, e.g., given that the ecosystem of interlinked technologies is in principle unbounded, how should assessment take place, be structured, and legitimately stop? This paper argues that the ethics of SDTs is better framed as a wicked problem, i.e., a problem defined by the irreducible intertwining of descriptive and normative uncertainties. That is, the problem cannot be formulated definitively because how the problem is described is inseparable from how it is evaluated, and it cannot be resolved definitively because every proposed solution both presupposes and transforms the evaluative framework against which its adequacy is assessed. The paper develops this claim in detail and argues that it carries substantive methodological implications for how ethics of technology should be approached at the ecosystem level and beyond.