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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GLASNOST (REGULATING STAFF ENHANCEMENT IN ORGANISATIONS (GLASNOST))

Teaser

Summary

The transhumanist movement has been actively promoting their vision of the enhanced human, an individual who has increased physical, psychological, and cognitive abilities, and would be therefore happier, for decades. Several individuals in this movement have reached positions of choice, working for companies like Google or campaigning for the US presidency. Recent technological developments also allow to see their philosophy realize itself. Companies are proposing to employees to use exoskeletons, bionic gloves, microchip implants, or wearable technology in order to help them to do their work better, with less effort, with better cognition.
The use of these emerging technologies is not ethically nor politically neutral. Opponents to transhumanism are afraid that these technologies are changing our relationship to each other, trigger a race to enhancement, and could lead to power imbalances threatening democracy. These thinkers demand that enhancement is regulated and even forbidden. Such considerations are of importance, however they focus on abstract reasoning and lead the debate to an impasse as they do not consider that the technology is being developed and that not only individual initiative but also organisational initiatives drive human enhancement. Eventually, it is noteworthy that these debates also tend to occur within the American culture, while enhancement is a worldwide phenomenon and ethical reasoning is not the same in every country. There is a governance issue at play.
Besides the philosophical and ethical questions raised by human enhancement, there are also managerial questions which emerge with the introduction of new technology. Namely, it is important to understand what drives their acceptation or the resistance to such technology, and how to implement the technology in a responsible manner. Responsible Research and Industry does promote the need to look at technology from, among others, the ethical perspective. Yet, the models of technology acceptation consider only the role of privacy and trust (in the technology) as ethical dimensions. There is a priori a gap between the philosophical considerations of the transhumanists and their opponents, and what is seen as driving acceptation.
It is important to see why individuals are ready to accept enhancement technologies and what ethical trade-offs they are making so that the policy-makers can eventually regulate enhancement and prohibit ethical trade-offs which are not in line with what is taken to be the development of a good society.
This project aimed primarily at finding a way out of the sterile ideological debates on human enhancement by identifying factors which would lead to an ethically acceptable and accepted implementation of human enhancement technology based on the study of real cases. A secondary goal of the project was to identify the ethical and political considerations attached to the use of enhancement technologies in the workplace, so that the policy-makers can reflect upon them and make decisions pertaining to regulation.

Work performed

\"In order to achieve these goals, four different work streams were conducted.
Firstly, cases of use of human enhancement technologies that were discussed in the press were investigated. These cases were chosen to capture cases of enhancement in the workplace, and cases of enhancement for individual purposes and outside of work, as well as cases where the enhancement technology is available widely for sale. The results were published in Technology and Society, and Human Behavior and Emerging Technology. They show that the use of enhancement technology is deeply rooted in personal history when it comes to individual enhancement. However, when it comes to enhancement in the workplace, there is a tension between oneâ€™s beliefs and the image that one wants to project, so that the consent to using the technology is tainted by the decision of individuals in the group around.
Secondly, a case was created, which involved the introduction of a wearable to increase awareness and eventually manage stress in nurses in health care institutions in Italy and in the Netherlands. Managerial considerations were captured, and the device was used by nurses. This case reveals that enhancing individuals in the workplace is not a form of individual enhancement, as employees are bound to be influenced by their peers but also perform tasks in group. They are affected by those who decide to use the technology. Their autonomy and ability to consent is all relative, even if the employer might think the use of the technology is ethical if employees were asked for consent. Preliminary results appear in Lecture Notes in Business Information Systems. The implementation of the device also reveals the risk to worsen already existing power imbalances in the workplace, as some populations can avoid the technology while those who do not have much power might be less conscious of its risks and less able to refuse it. Preliminary results were presented at the Institut dâ€™Ã‰tudes AvancÃ©es of Nantes, the University of Nantes, and EXOBerlin in 2019. Another point of consideration is how is the data collected by enhancement technologies managed and to whom they belong, which will be the object of a chapter in the forthcoming book \"\"Big Data and Democracy\"\".Before implementing the devices, the researcher had also used them to assess the risks that could come out of the experimentation. To that purpose, an original methodology was developed. Results were presented at the conference of the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity in 2018 and 2019.
Thirdly, citizensâ€™ opinions were surveyed during the European Researchersâ€™ Night in Brussels in 2018. It appears that those rejecting enhancement technologies do so by fear that there might be undesirable managerial consequences, which need to be regulated. Partial results are published in Qualitative Research Journal.
Fourthly, a theoretical analysis took place in order to identify points of ethical consideration which were dismissed by individuals and propose a theory of enhancement of organisations.

Besides being featured in research journals, the project and results were disseminated to the public via participation in the Dutch and European Researchersâ€™ Night, the Breaking Wall event in Brussels, publication in university press (U-Today), and work with schools in the USA. The results and know-how gained on this project were also shared with other European projects such as the MCSA-ITN Affectech, the EU2020 SIENNA and SHERPA projects. Methodological knowledge was shared with members of the MIDAS project.\"

Final results

The project allows expanding prior understanding of forms of enhancement (from individual to managerial, from private to organisational) and identifies related ethical considerations. The extant literature focused on issues of access to technology and race to enhancement, while the project shows that even if these elements play a role in shaping the acceptability of enhancement at work, issues of autonomy, identity, and body perception are also at play. Careful consideration must be given to who is meant to be enhanced at work and the consequences of this enhancement must be measured.