TECHNOLIFE · a Transdisciplinary approach to the Emerging CHallenges of NOvel technologies: Lifeworld and Imaginaries in Foresight and Ethics

The TECHNOLIFE project will approach the SiS 5.1.1.2 call by developing new ethical frameworks to address ethical concerns of Europeans in relation to three technological fields: ICTs, Geographical Imaging Systems and converging technologies to enhance the human body. It will supply valuable insights on how issues of ethical concern to groups, publics and citizens can be considered in EC policy in the three technological fields. We propose a novel approach to the research on ethical frameworks, using the concept of imagined communities as a way of getting to ethical concerns in ways that do not unduly suppress their complexity, heterogeneity and communicatively challenging character. The emphasis on information, communication and perception enhancing technologies is appropriate since these are strong promoters in the ongoing restructuring of social groups and imaginaries that go to make up the future Europe. They also transform the very meaning of human sociability, identity, communication and community in ways that pose great challenges to ethical theory and ethics for policy. Dominant imaginaries, ethical concerns and broad technological developments will be described deploying insights from a number of disciplines. These will be fed into an online database where they will be used for deliberation by a number of invited participants from concerned groups and publics. The results of the process will be analysed and interpreted to identify central imaginaries and their related arguments and viewpoints among the relevant groups. The qualitative data will then be used to: 1) develop new ethical frameworks fitted to the social and analytic level of imagined communities; 2) provide guidelines for the EC on policy in the three technological fields; 3) establish a web portal that can be used for further deliberation on the three fields, and 4) supply documentation on the overall process to be used for the development of ethical frameworks in other technological fields.