Technology Impact Assessment
Updated 2026-08-18
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Technology impact assessment evaluates the social, economic, and environmental consequences of a technology before it is deployed at scale. The core claim is that a technology's externalities appear long after adoption, so a structured projection made beforehand converts invisible long-term risk into information that decision-makers can act on. Key qualifications are that the assessment must consider effects on groups who are not party to the decision, and that a narrow scope will miss the most important externalities.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Draw the boundary: decide which populations and dimensions the assessment will cover. - Project the second order: ask what changes once the technology is widely adopted. - Name the losers: identify who bears the cost, including groups outside the decision.
Anchor fast decisions
A technology's costs and benefits arrive on different schedules: the benefits are usually immediate and concentrated on adopters, while the harms accumulate slowly and fall on people who never chose the technology. Because those harms are invisible at the moment of adoption, they are not weighed in the decision that creates them. Projecting them beforehand and widening the scope to include affected outsiders brings the missing costs into the same decision, where they can be limited or compensated.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_assessmentverified
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