This chapter develops a critical analysis of Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA). FRIA is a risk-based and ex-ante mandatory procedure for evaluating potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that makes an appearance in Article 27 of the AI Act but has not yet entered into force. Nonetheless, it is possible to evaluate it as a distinct type of governance instrument and to understand how it is intended to contribute to AI oversight. FRIA promises to integrate fundamental rights concerns in the cycle of development of AI systems and foster accountability and transparency. The issue is approached by situating FRIA within the broader historical and conceptual landscape of the governance of emerging technologies, with a specific focus on the practice of technology assessment (TA). TA has become a central tool in contemporary governance to evaluate the social, legal and economic consequences of emerging technologies. Drawing on past and current experience in TA, we will examine the methodological and implementation challenges to FRIA, as a tool to produce enhanced knowledge about AI within society and as an effective instrument for steering technological development. Overall, our contribution offers a preliminary evaluation of FRIA, its potential use, and foreseeable challenges. These insights are meant to identify new possible directions for research in legal and social sciences and to improve accountability, transparency and social responsiveness in AI governance.

This contribution aims to introduce the topic under investigation in this special section and highlight the connections between the three essays contained in it. Taken as a whole, the special section explores the relationships between the human body, science and technology by focusing both on present material interactions and interventions and on futuristic visions of bodily enhancements. It shows how science and technology studies scholars can explore the co-construction of the body as the result of the interaction between human and nonhuman agency, materiality, knowledge and institutions. From this perspective, the body and its subjectivity emerge as relational phenomena from multiple entangled sociomaterial configurations spanning space and time. Hence, this special section reinforces the call for a processual understanding of living bodies as emerging from the intertwining of human and nonhuman entities.

This editorial by the board of STS Italia (The Italian Society for Social Studies of Science and Technology) introduces a Special Section of the Journal collecting a set of contributions to the IX STS Italia Conference, held in June 2023. The Special Section features an invited Lecture by Huub Dijstelbloem followed by a short commentary by Annalisa Pelizza. In addition, the Section includes the Crossing Boundaries “Drawing Bruno Together” and the Scenario “Bruno Latour and Artificial Intelligence” dedicated to Bruno Latour and both written by long-term colleagues, friends and exegetes of his work.

This short essay by the departing board of STS Italia (Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies) introduces a Special Section of the Journal collecting a set of writings that present and develop some of the key themes of the VIII STS Italia Conference, held in June 2021 as a virtual event. The Special Section features an invited essay by Dimitris Papadopulos and Andrea Ghelfi followed by a short commentary by Luigi Pellizzoni. In addition, the Section includes ten different "Conference Reflections" - as situated perspectives on the meeting - written by colleagues who had a major role in organizing the event, or who convened one of the conference thematic tracks. As a whole, the Conference Reflections help broaden and improve our understanding of the manner and extent in which contextualized meanings and local socio-material practices constitute the fabric of the socio-technical environments where we live, thus unveiling the inextricable entanglement of novel vulnerabilities and technoscience.

Science diplomacy (SD) is an emerging field of study at the intersection of international relations and science policy. Despite such a growing interest, the region of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe has received limited attention by the scholars studying this increasingly significant topic. This article presents the preliminary results of a research focusing on international scientific collaborations between the countries that are members of the Central European Initiative (CEI), an intergovernmental forum for regional cooperation spanning across this broad region of Europe. Using social network analysis (SNA), the paper explores which countries are the most prominent in these cooperation networks and whether the countries sharing EU membership are clustered into separate, distinct subgroups, with fewer or weaker ties with Non-EU members.

•Explains the inspiration for a special issue of Futures on ‘wise futures’.•A provocation to stimulate a larger conversation about the nature of wisdom in the future.•Provides a brief overview of the history of wisdom.•Positions the future of wisdom as a wisdom of the future.•Introduces some ideas about what the process of reflecting on wisdom and its close cousin responsibility, may involve.

Innovation can be conceived of as 'collective experimentation', and industry can be viewed as a full partner in heterogeneous innovation networks. The significance of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) depends on the possibility of aligning the diverse actors involved in innovation processes, including firms. A specific challenge in Italy is that the overall majority of industrial companies are small and medium enterprises (SMEs). By reporting the opinions of the participants in an Italian stakeholder workshop, this article suggests that intermediation processes and intermediary agents have an important influence on the uptake of RRI in SMEs.

This chapter argues that responsible research and innovation (RRI) can be an effective answer to this twofold uncertainty, so that responsiveness and the normative steering of research and innovation acquire more importance over risk individuation and management. It examines the diffusion of soft regulation as an important component of the governance framework of science and technology. Soft regulation attempts to answer the twofold uncertainty described above, which is addressed by leveraging the knowledge pool possessed by the regulatees and by integrating the divergence of values and interests through cooperation and flexibility. The chapter presents RRI in the broader context of the evolution of responsibility paradigms. By referring to their characterization in terms of time orientation and active/passive attitude to responsibility, three paradigms are distinguished. RRI aims at introducing responsibility into research and innovation processes at an early stage, by involving those who are concerned with their consequences in framing innovation activities, their aims and their goals.

The article investigates the sociocultural implications of the changing modern workplace and of pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) as a potential adaptive tool from the viewpoint of social niche construction. We will attempt to elucidate some of the sociocultural and technological trends that drive and influence the characteristics of this specific niche, and especially to identify the kind of capabilities and adaptations that are being promoted, and to ascertain the capabilities and potentialities that might become diminished as a result. In this context, we will examine what PCE is, and how and why it might be desirable as a tool for adaptation within the workplace. As human beings are, or at least should be allowed to be, more than merely productive, able-bodied and able-minded workers, we will further examine how adaptation to the workplace niche could result in problems inother domains of modern societal life that require the same or other cognitive capabilities. In this context we will also focus on the concept of responsibility and how it pertains to PCE and the modern workplace niche. This will shed some light on the kind of trends related to workplace niche construction, PCE and capability promotion that we can expect in the future, and on the contexts in which this might be either beneficial or detrimental to the individual as a well-rounded human being, and to other members of society.

The techno-moral scenarios (TMS) approach has been developed to explore the interplay between technology, society and morality. Focused on new and emerging sciences and technologies, techno-moral scenarios can be used to inform and enhance public deliberation on the desirability of socio-technical trajectories. The article presents an attempt to hybridise this scenario tool, complementing the focus on ethics with an explicit acknowledgement of the multiple meanings of responsibility and of the plurality of its regimes, i.e. the institutional arrangements presiding over the assumption and assignment of responsibilities. We call this integrated technique rTMS' to stress the continuity with the original technique and, at the same time, to highlight the additional element we aim to develop: responsibility. The article describes this approach and illustrates a loosely standardised procedure that can be used to organise and conduct public engagement workshops based on rTMS.

Soft regulation has increased its importance in science and technology governance. Despite such indisputable significance, the literature on technology policy and regulation so far seems to have dedicated only a limited attention to a systematic understanding of the factors affecting compliance with these soft rules. This article addresses this limitation. By way of a literature scoping exercise, we propose a taxonomy of the mechanisms affecting compliance with soft regulation. We subsequently apply the taxonomy as a guide to examine the opinions of a small group of scientists and company managers in the Italian nanotechnology sector. The case study does not assess compliance in a direct way, i.e., observing how organizations comply with regulation, but it explores the opinions on what the factors affecting compliance are (and why they work).

This chapter explores some major trends in science, technology and society relations as the background against which the responsible governance of science and technology is framed. The dimensions this chapter describes reflect the "essential elements of responsibility" identified in the first chapter: the consequences of action, the criteria for their assessment, and the actors that are involved. Accordingly, the chapter illustrates and discusses the following aspects of the relations between science, technology and society: (1) the impact of scientific knowledge and technology development on society; (2) the criteria considered legitimate to assess these impacts; (3) the actors that are considered relevant to steer and assess science, technology and their impacts on society. By examining significant examples of the literature, the chapter will present and discuss some of the most relevant patterns and trends which these different approaches share. The changing status and recognition of the uncertainty surrounding science, technology and their impacts is seen as a crucial aspect affecting these relations.

The notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has increasingly attracted attention in the academic literature. Up until now, however, the literature has focused on clarifying the principles for which research and innovation are responsible and on examining the conditions that account for managing them responsibly. Little attention has been reserved to exploring the political-economic context in which the notion of RRI has become progressively more prominent. This article tries to address this aspect and suggests some preliminary considerations on the connections between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as 'neoliberalism'. To do so, we try to illustrate how the idea of responsibility has evolved over time so that the specific characteristics of RRI can be better highlighted. These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility. Eventually, we reaffirm a view of RRI centred on fundamental rights as a possible point of departure between these two perspectives on responsibility.

This chapter introduces the notion of expectations as the source of orientation in social relations. Expectations and their orientation function are discussed from the point of view of social theory, with selected examples from diverse sociological approaches. With no ambition to create a comprehensive picture, the chapter highlights the fact that all these approaches share the view that the stability and the inter-connectedness of expectations reduce the contingency of social interaction. This chapter moves on to consider how expectations have been conceptualized in the more specialised field of science and technology studies (STS) and how these future-oriented representations orient research and development activities, performing a coordination function of the relevant actors, setting constraints and enablers for their strategic activities and, ultimately, shaping the "possibility space" of technology development. The chapter then emphasises the novelty that STS introduces in dealing with the subject of expectations, when compared with mainstream social theory: materiality. In illustrating the place of expectations in action orientation, the chapter recognises however that action and the actor's (anticipatory) knowledge is never immune from uncertainty. The final section of the chapter refers to trust as the element that allows us to bear the weight of uncertainty and permits us to orientate actions and establish relations when intractable contingency affects interaction.

This chapter illustrates the different meanings of responsibility and establishes a link between this notion and the concepts of social action and social relation. The etymology of the word responsibility is examined and, by referring to philosophy and legal theory, the semantic complexity of this notion is addressed. The emphasis on action, its consequences and their assessment are considered as the key elements of responsibility. Three "modes of enactment" of responsibility (assumption, ascription, subjection) are distinguished as establishing different links between these elements in social processes. Max Weber's definition of social action, which is an action oriented to the behaviour of others, is introduced to translate in sociological terms the "orientation to others" that the etymology of the word responsibility suggests. Drawing from Weber's theory of action, responsibility is then seen as a combination of instrumentally rational and value -rational actions, which are social, in Weber's sense, because they are oriented, in terms of causal consequences and meanings, to the behaviour of others. Following Max Weber again, "responsibility relations" are then seen as constituted by the mutual orientation of the three modes of enactment.

In this chapter, the notions of expectations, uncertainty, and trust are combined to formulate a framework that is able to track the changes of and conflicts over the three modes of enactment of responsibility (assumption, ascription, and subjection) we have identified. Before presenting the model, three dedicated sections summarise the considerations presented in the previous chapters on social action, expectations and trust. This analysis is then developed into a heuristic framework to explore the changing configurations of responsibility and to explore the conditions and factors explaining these changes. The functioning of the framework is exemplified by outlining a brief sketch of two broad ideal types of responsibility in science and technology (focused responsibility and diffuse responsibility), which draws on the account of science, technology and society trends described in the preceding chapter.