Which signals this distrust in government. This is just part of the diagnosis not the complete diagnosis but the part of this distrust is a result of feeling of powerlessness over their own situation and so this brings me back to my central point of autonomy so if people feel they are master of the changes in their environment then this distrust against authorities would also diminish Hi and welcome back today we have Dr. René von Schomberg again so welcome back to the program how have you been? Oh I’m fine so as you know I’m currently in Aachen as a Senior Research Fellow so I have a lot of freedom to do my own research so I feel very luxurious and privileged positioned at the moment liberated from the pressures of my work at the European Commission in the past That's right because last time we spoke you were still at the European Commission and you were there for such a long time doing really great work driving the whole responsible innovation movement across Europe. If you look back looking towards the future as well what's the most critical trend in the field of policy? I see it a little bit in two polls which contradict each other things can go either way I said in my last interview with you I hope that citizens can become actor of change rather than only be subject to change when it comes to innovation now in order to achieve that to get to such let's say utopian vision almost one needs changes in society which leads to more democratization of course and this has always been part of responsible research and innovation in itself but it has broader scope it touches upon all aspects of our living for example with the event of the internet 20 years ago that people can become more easily an author or a writer but you have the same development with other technologies we can think in the future that our houses produce actually more energy than we need it can feed our cars or whatever we can become independent of energy suppliers with 3D printing another example we all now are only consumers most of the time but we can become producers with this new technology and now the question is whether our societies allow this further autonomy of the people to do or to facilitate these things or we go the other way that we still remain dependent on either the state or big companies or and be subject to change I don't know how this will play out if you would think in a progressive way then it will go in utopian direction I just mentioned that we all become actors of change rather than that we are subject to these things and that we can help to define the characteristics of the technologies we would like to have because as you know our responsible research and innovation is all about social desirable innovations but very key from this is something let's say which is connected almost to human rights which increases our autonomy as individuals now of course with artificial intelligence we have again a technology which touches upon this autonomy directly this is something one needs to explore further from this perspective I think if you know retrospectively look back to what has happened the last 50 years and you can maintain this positive view You just said there are two different ways we can go I’m wondering what other core capacities we need to build in order for us to give individuals more agency to shape technology innovation this could be capacity with the industry within companies and or perhaps just individual citizens? I personally think it has to go over organizations of course individuals can engage with various activities you know even in aspects such as citizen science which can also underpin responsible research and innovation or other forms of citizens engagement we need organizations to allow for these changes and probably new organizations and new governing bodies in which citizens are represented in one way or another actors which are at the currently do not have a sufficient role in this process should be enabled to have this role so it’s very often a situation in which people do want to have responsibility over things we just simply cannot and that means that this enabling of responsibility is a task for public authorities it's part of a political vision to allow this so the capacity has to go to organizations this is one of the deficits at the moment which can steer or direct innovations towards social desirable lens and this can be sector specific maybe either in energy or in mobility but we need in these sectors interactions with public authorities to allow this to happen and enable people to take responsibility in this regard we have a lot of activities in which industry engages itself with citizens or research projects this is of course in itself also all fine and I even can should be encouraged but probably in the end this is not sufficient we need third-party organizations which can mediate between a society and big organizations or big industries it has also to do a little bit with the issue of trust and you see also actually very much currently in our societies a distrust against bigger organizations but also against the state even if it's not justified of course one can say well people simply have to trust their governments but you can also think of okay if the governments and industry allow third-party organizations to control or verify and help what they are doing then this would counteract this element of distrust Is the core erosion of trust because of the say for example with the big tech companies or are there other reasons why trust is eroding? Well this is a good question I would not have a full explanation of this myself because there are sometimes very extreme things you know like we had in some countries in Europe for example protests against 5G internet because I think it creates viruses or things like that one can speculate where this all comes from now these are relatively I would say minor things but it's a symptom of a broader element which signals this distrust in government this is just part of the diagnosis not the complete diagnosis but the part of this distrust is a result of feeling of powerlessness over their own situation and so this brings me back to my central point of autonomy so if people feel they are master of the changes in their environment then this distrust against authorities would also diminish I’m a proponent of further European integration on the other hand people thinking okay these supranational organizations are far from my home and they don't feel that they would align with them anymore because they think it further increases their problem of powerlessness over their changes I think it's something which we have to take very serious as public authorities so this is also I think a reason why European Commission also now in the field of research tries to involve citizens in their research agendas more directly the question of course whether this will be sufficient and how this will be done but it is an element which we have to take serious If say you have been given an unlimited amount of funding what specific things would you invest in as a priority and what would you not invest in? I would certainly invest in innovation missions which are oriented around our big societal challenges or global challenges you know be it on climate change or food security the issue here is to make them relevant for reaching individuals and cities and it is interesting to see if you take climate change for example there's a lot of research going on that but it always has to do with global models and we argue about whether two degrees Celsius rises is too much or too little or something like that but it's all related to global models but we don't relate it to what does this change of two degrees means for my city for example what does this mean for my director environment and then if you would do take this approach then you get surprising results actually and also different results and different challenges for those cities and it's then it's not all equal around the world and I think this is where we have to invest in I think this is also one of the successes I would say from responsible research and innovation in the last 10 years that European Commission has embarked on such missions in theory they run around let's say the slogan of co-creation and co-design and citizen involvement so it's actually a new instrument I think it's unfortunately sometimes presented in very old-fashioned and in wrong ways like bringing a man on the moon or something like this which is a technical question challenge and it's not the type of challenge we are facing now we face actually our problems are social this is what is also new they are not technological central they are human central of course we will need to exploit technologies but it's not about using them solely with the perspective of economic benefits for example I think this is an important shift So is the approach to get everyone from the get-go involved in participating in shaping innovation or are there groups that can help to propel and educate the greater mass of people? Well you are right I mean education also called plays it plays a central role in the last few years some universities have taken the initiative to change their educational programs away from disciplines to challenge what they call “challenge oriented learning” and so that let's say study electrotechnics or some technical study that they that really study these things in the context of some societal challenges where they also need insights from other scientific disciplines there are initiatives at least at the university education levels to change the way we actually motivate students to work in this challenge-oriented way it is very important that this happens because it enables another mindset but of course you need also the new infrastructure for innovation we need new government bodies who can help us to direct the innovations in the directions we want and because now we have only government bodies who actually address a risk we have a lot of a body who you know scientific committees which address the risk of technology and safety issues or very important issues but we need something more on top of that broader citizens can come in but this may actually be become very sector dependent for example around agriculture with farmers and other consumer organizations and in the field of medicine for example with patient organizations and so on some sectors are dominated by very few multinationals like in the agro tech business five or six multinationals operating worldwide actually shaping our global markets where this contrasts are sharply with what is desirable at regional levels I don't see at the moment actually developments which counter balance these things we are still a little bit dependent on the goodwill of those companies in certain cases like what we have recently seen with the pharmaceutical industry which finally agreed among each other to facilitate certain medicines for free or easy access in poorer countries the desires individual or accidental events this does not help us to shape our reshape our future in a more structural way everyone needs to work on more let's say a broader topic around the public governance of our economy Which industries do you think are more ready for responsible innovation and which are which industries may need a little bit more help? Yeah that's a that's a good point what I just said sound a little bit negative in a sense I mean you know not so hopeful but on the other hand you can look also to what we see happening in the industries also in the big industries let's imagine you have a product and you market it worldwide and twenty percent of the population would buy a product that that would be an enormous success I think probably if five percent would buy it you already have an enormous success you would have an enormous business now even for these big companies who have a big market share even they now realize that they cannot be only happy with this fact they also have to worry about those people who don't buy their products so I think there is a sense of responsibility which goes beyond this let's say this market success for example the Dutch multinational in chemical industry DSM has a sort of principle that besides of profit they have to comply with some self-made criteria you know around the ecology and also around the people the human resources which are affected by it and otherwise they would not use these it would not produce these products one of course can be sceptical about these things but I do think it's much more than just an selling exercise or an image exercise it is an attempt to take responsibility for something which is not immediately in the scope of what you normally would call a business operation the problem here is that if institutions who take up third parties need to come in here to have to reinforce these things otherwise it can be a tool of a CEO who is in charge for five years and when the person is gone then the program is gone this happens also so you need something structural here and you see it also in philanthropic organizations which are let's take the example of the Bill Gates Fundation they do fantastic work but one has also to realize what does it actually mean that we are dependent on them there's a lacuna somewhere which needs to be filled and then the question is can we leave it up to philanthropic and then my answer would be no I mean it's nice that these people do it but we need a new infrastructure here that becomes evident Then just say a company is genuinely want to do responsible innovation what are the three questions that these companies can ask themselves to start driving responsible innovation? The most basic element what I said from social desirable innovations is of course will it enhance people's autonomy and so on does it contribute to the life of individuals one can answer this question by saying well if people buy it on the market and apparently does but you can also think in a more longer term issue you know whether this will contribute to where we want to head towards industry would need to engage in citizens to find out what type of products they would actually prefer there has to be also a sort of baseline now or a direction where we want to go and I think this is not up to individual citizens or citizens organizations only I mean citizens organizations can also want very bad things I mean in America you have the National Rifle Association you want people to have more weapons I mean people can want all kinds of things so you need a public authority which gives a direction this is one of the things I find positive in Europe at the beginning of new governance period of the European Commission with the Green Deal for a first time again a sort of vision you know which direction we have to go and what are our deadlines so to speak if we want to get there in the meantime this has been unfortunately overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and restraints by individual countries or making abuse of it by propagating nuclear power for example so you get these things now back on the agenda as well but the initial idea was good and I hope it will also survive the current crisis I’m not one who only want to say is industry was the blame of for instance we have also allowed industry to, in the last 20 years to have too much power in these things public authorities has to regain their role in this area and not only in saying what is what allowed but also in what we do want to have, give directions to things That leads to the question of: technology is changing so fast traditionally policy somewhat lagged after the technology has been introduced in society I would imagine that as we go forward and as technologies begin to change even faster the gap might widen how do we address the gap can we close that gap? This is the really structural problem I think I used the example in my book on new technologies in agriculture which is called precision technology so this is we can let's say facilitate our agriculture with the use of drones and sensors and we can measure our acres with what they need in terms of pesticides and we can organize this in a way that big companies actually will run farms in a remote way I mean the future could be that there are no farmers on the farmland anymore that it’s all done by automatic tractors and everything is automated the central point here is that these technologies can be made in such a way that they serve are centrally organized by big companies or the same type of technologies are used by farmers who collaborate with each other sort of cooperative farming or who share these technologies and so you can make these technologies fit for very huge farms who reduce commodities but you can also you make these technologies fit for smaller farmers who produce a more diversity of products although the technology in itself is the same the direction what will take place or possibly maybe both things will happen actually the shaping of these technologies are dependent on the input so that means in this case farmers has to become active and if I come back to my autonomy point again so I think the suicide rate on the farmers is the highest than in any other sector because they see that the pleasure of doing farming disappears in this mass production of commodities and using animals in extreme forms of production machines so to speak so this delineates farmers from their world, their pleasure in their work but if they want to regain it they have to become active and say okay I collaborate with my neighbours and I don't see him not only as a competitor but as somebody who works it in the same way like me and this can also be a driver of change it's a little bit boring to say that but public authorities have to take a lead there and I have to say okay let's support this direction or not for example in this case it means whether data which are collected on farmers lands is only owned by big companies or are owned by the farmers these are directions which public authorities needs to define or in terms of new codes of practices for example so the shaping of these technologies are really dependent on power relations but also on the initiatives of individuals in those sectors if you see autonomy of individuals and as important of course it presupposes that these individuals become active and protest or try to push for their ways to for better solutions so one has to see also again how this will play out one has to do has to become active at the right point of time because once these technologies are there on a massive scale then it's very difficult to undo we have now everybody has one or two cars or something and in the beginning cars were fantastic now we see there is a problem with them but we cannot get rid of it in this way and this is also why we even don't change our way of mobility in a fundamental sense we keep on the same track and this is with all technology is the case this example what I just gave about precision technology it's about right now the time to become active this is of course for responsible innovation and a challenge What do you think about capabilities of policymakers are there areas that you think require a boosting capabilities to help enable them to adapt with and stay ahead of technology? one can see policymakers who are always too late to respond to things or they are only reactive you can also think of policy that becoming more proactive so this is why I’m a very proponent of foresight and which is also a cornerstone and supporting responsible innovation and it's especially again the public authorities who have to facilitate this foresight we do that to some extent so and foresight is very important in developing scenarios you know what type of futures are possible and what type of futures do we want ideally these foresight exercises are also participative in nature you include citizens in these exercises or stakeholders you use that also as a policy tool this is one of the things we need to do more in policy it's happening of course I don't know how it is in Australia but I know that in quite a few governments foresight is seen as an important tool but you can also use this foresight again to broaden it with citizen participation and what type of futures do they want and then it allows you also to earlier intervening where it's essential because when certain technology are entrenched it is very difficult to change so I think there is a task to further institutionalize foresight in policy processes it's actually interesting that we especially have it when there is some kind of crisis coming on and since the last 10 years we only had crisis so we have a lot of foresight I’m going to change gear a little bit okay and this is a more of a personal journey question What is a lesson that has taken you years to learn? So I was actually thinking about an issue which I have been which I dealt with which I also wrote later on that is on the Precautionary Principle and actually something which brought me to the European Commission more than 20 years ago I was a member of a negotiating team of the European Commission on the biosafety protocol which is a protocol under the biological biodiversity convention of the United Nations so this is around 1999 2000 around 140 countries participated in the negotiation to have such a biosafety protocol which would address the issue on how to trade genetically modified organisms in that context the Precautionary Principle is of importance we had it in European Union formally since 1992 and the Precautionary Principle would actually lower the threshold for public authorities to act so that they cannot say we don't have scientific certainty on this issue so we don't do anything the issue would be other way around if there is scientific uncertainty and the risk can be considerable then there is a sort of urgency to act when we entered these negotiations you had a certain front lines you know on one side you had the European Union and on the other side you had the Anglo-Saxon countries Canada, the US, Australia and then you had a group of countries led among others by India so when I entered this negotiate when I had to go in with defending the Precautionary Principle bring it in let's say in the context of the biosafety protocol a chairman of a negotiating committee I said that I was using inflammatory language and we should ban the words from this negotiating team I was not allowed to use it anymore so my first initial reaction was that you know we let not others determine our vocabulary but then later I thought maybe and this is actually the lesson maybe it's actually a good idea not to use this word but in the negotiation to introduce all kinds of elements which are relevant for the Precautionary Principle and which would bring it in without naming actually it as a principle itself so issues for example that risk assessments are never completed you have to do them over and over again there is no expiry date to it you have to address scientific uncertainties you have to monitor at first effects etc now in the end all these elements which are relevant for the Precautionary Principle and triggered them off were actually negotiated into the biosafety protocol and it was a very heated discussion a lot of conflicts around countries but in the end when the protocol was concluded it was amusing to see that at different side of the oceans there was a different assessment of what was negotiated so in the European Union they were very happy with the result they say yeah the Precautionary Principle has been incorporated in the biosafety protocol whereas at the other side of the ocean is that no this was not the case now in fact the word was not used but you see the interpretation frame was there but it served the purpose so the learning process there was actually to be successful in these negotiations you sometimes need to change gear and this is something which I’ve of course learned and which you don't experience let's say as an academic this is something which is typical of a learning experience as a negotiator in this realm Is that a lesson of not so much worried about particular phrases and definitions but actually focusing on the actual work involved in driving a particular change? Well yeah well exactly if you would have entered the negotiations with insisting okay we need to have an article on the Precautionary Principle and let's define it together we would never have got there but by not referring to it anymore and focusing on some elements from which you know they are relevant and to be sure that these elements are in the protocol you get further and this is also what actually happened I think we can learn a lot about that when it comes to responsible innovation, responsible research and innovation etc. Absolutely have the same the same issues on another level I’m going to ask you my closing question which is your vision for the future the question is: envision 2050 what would you hope it to look like feel like and sound like? Well this is of course where we started off with I mean my vision was that people are authors change so that they can help to give directions to innovations and maybe even that we live in a society where people are more cooperative that we don't only compete with each other but we cooperate with each other and work together on common solutions so that we have an enhancement of autonomy of individuals on the one the hand which is essential here but also that we have a collective society global citizens cooperating on issues of common concern Thank you so much again I’m going to link our previous interview with this interview so those people who want to listen a bit more about your work and find out who you are they can so thank you so much and I hope to see you soon Thank you Xiao Han, it was a pleasure
2022-10-13