ABSTRACT
Technological innovations are key issues in politics and economics. They also legitimize-if it’s new, it’s good. Today, political discourses on employment increasingly concern innovation capacities in a competitive international race. Thus technological choices are strategic. If the private sector and the market play an important role in this, the political dimension is also vital, from educational options to choices between different fi scal incentives. The political decision makers need expert advice-decision makers who are not able to understand and anticipate all aspects of many complex questions-this is the genesis of Technological Assessment (TA). But every technology, like the two-faced Janus, has two sides. Innovations carry with them risks as well as advantages. In the extreme, “meliorism” is in competition with responsibility: to put it in terms of the opposition between Ernst Bloch (1959) and Hans Jonas (1979), doing “better” technologically may also incur grave costs and “rampant apocalypticism.” In this case, risk policy must be some part of innovation policy. Sometimes innovations are unwelcome and a source of controversy in the wider population, and even among scientists. In certain cases, like genetically modifi ed (GM) foods or brain sciences, the scientists are not in a position to produce robust evidence and to declare a given innovation innocuous, contrary to the hopes of politicians or other stakeholders. Are politicians then condemned to take strong decisions on the basis of weak certainties, given that they are accountable for public welfare and must safeguard the common good?
