The emergence of nanotechnology, with all its promises of economic, social, and medical benefits, along with dire predictions of environmental, health, and safety threats, has occasioned an active debate in the Science and Technology Studies field, in which we have seen five distinct conversations that frame the discussion. The topical threads include ethics, regulation, opportunities and threats including utopian/dystopian visions of the future, public perception, public participation. These conversational distinctions are not absolutes with firm borders as they clearly overlap at (...) many points. Nonetheless, common to all is a strong sense that control and consequence are significant problems that have yet to be addressed adequately by the promoters of nanotechnology. A final section addresses articles on nanotechnology that exemplify the social construction theory of technology. We include herein a selective summary of this recent body of science, technology, and society (STS) journal literature focused on the social and ethical interactions of nanotechnology (SEIN) that has emerged in the last few years. The intent is not to be encyclopedic in coverage, but rather to seek to understand, in a general way, the key issues and concepts STS scholars are discussing. It is clear that STS-oriented scholars are well poised to grapple explicitly with the cultural, socio-political, and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. Drawing on understandings of earlier socio-technical areas of interest and concern—nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, the human genome—such scholars have moved well beyond the questions of whether and where nanotechnology intersects society. More important is their effort to seek an understanding in depth of exactly how they are socio-politically, culturally, and ethically interconnected. In doing so, SEIN studies have at the same time become increasingly diverse and more sophisticated and mature over the course of the past decade. Scholars have quite rightly recognized the inadequacies of blanket ideas of moratoria versus non-regulatory environments, utopian versus dystopian futures, and whether or not the public has a role to play in nanotechnology decision making. Rather, a more sophisticated, often case specific, flexible understanding of the societal context of a given issue or concern is called for. (shrink)

Nanotechnology—the control of matter at the level of atoms and molecules—has evoked a large body of literature on moral and ethical issues. Almost all of this is expressed in secular voices. Religious commentaries about nanotechnology have been much more rare. And yet survey research indicates that religious belief will be one of the most powerful influences in shaping public views about nanotechnology. This paper argues that it is worth knowing what religious voices have said about nanotechnology, so that we might (...) anticipate additional religious reactions in the future. After that, this paper presents seven cases of religious reactions to nanotechnology from a variety of faiths. This information gives us some insights about how religious individuals and institutions think about this technology, and also insights about how a new technology evokes a variety of hopes and fears. (shrink)

The subject of this essay is NBIC convergence (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science convergence). NBIC convergence is a recurring trope that is dominated by the paradigm of integration of the sciences. It is largely influenced by the considerations of social and economic impact, and it assumes positivism in the name of technological progress. The culture of NBIC convergence, including NBIC discourses, is ensconced on the borders between modernity/ postmodernity, ambition/restraint, unity/fragmentation, and rational intellect/creativity. Both the rhetoric of ambition (...) and visionary development, and its responding calls for some level of restraint and caution, make contrasting assumptions that, however unintentionally, further polarize the debate concerning NBIC technologies. Those engaged in producing the culture, including scientists, engineers, and ethicists of convergence, consider the ramifications of these technologies for subjectivity and identity in ways that do not fully account for the diversity of human experience, or the ambiguity of human nature. NBIC convergence, such as artificial intelligence, is a “projection of the normative self, unaware of its own specificity;” in other words, that converging technologies offer negligible insight into human corporeality or experience and, in their theoretical frameworks, are hardly conscious of the necessity of effectively mobilizing the diversity within society and of social existence in bringing about nanotechnology’s “maximum benefit to humanity,” and are part and parcel of creating a “nanoself,” bereft of uniqueness. (shrink)