ABSTRACT
Technology assessment should and shall address societal challenges around technology, help to understand them better, and in particular, contribute to exploring and investigating adequate measures of response and action. Understanding these challenges is essential in order to learn why technology assessment emerged at all, and what it is expected to deliver. These challenges and the resulting motivations include the increasing influence of scientific and technological advances on all areas of human life, the occurrence of several dramatic unintended side effects of technology and of severe technology conflicts, the relationships between technology and democracy facing the threat of technocracy, the postulate of sustainable development and its implications for the development and use of technology, the wave of techno-visionary futures which entered public and political debate early this century, and changes at the interface between science and technology.
