The tech of tomorrow

Advances in technology can make our lives easier, but new developments also bring new risks. Emerging technologies can grow rapidly and society is expected to become ever more reliant on them as their use becomes increasingly widespread.

A team of researchers has examined the risks linked with these technologies to provide an assessment of current knowledge and pinpoint the methods used to identify these risks. Their findings could help inform future research areas and highlight those where mitigation can be put in place.

In their article, published in the journal Ergonomics, they identified ten risk themes connected to emerging technologies:

• risks to human health and wellbeing
• sub-standard technology risks
• legal and ethical risks
• privacy and security risks
• socioeconomic impacts
• ecological and environmental risks
• malicious use risks
• geopolitical risks
• technological unemployment risks
• existential threats.

They said: “While typically offering significant benefits, emerging technologies often also pose a broad spectrum of individual, organisational and societal risks. As technologies become more advanced and more integral to societal functioning, this emerging technology paradox represents a critical threat to humanity.

“Understanding not only the risks associated with emerging technologies, but also how best they can be identified and controlled, is therefore critical. This review has demonstrated that a diverse set of emerging technologies and risks have been identified but that further research is required to ensure a more comprehensive and rigorous assessment of future risks.”

It added: “Further, the integration of methods from the futures literature [a way to use fiction to imagine and act on future societies] with prospective risk assessment methods offers an opportunity for human factors researchers and practitioners to enhance the validity of future technology risk assessment.”

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