TechEthos started with a horizon scan to identify new and emerging technologies with high economical and ethical relevance, i.e. where substantial challenges for societal embeddings are expected. The resulting TechEthos portfolio consists of climate engineering, digital extended reality and neurotechnologies. After the scanning phase, ethical, societal and legal/policy analysis took place for these technologies. Ethical values and principles, societal awareness and attitudes, and policy regulation issues were highlighted. Based on the analysis results, the enhancement phase unfolded. TechEthos provides detailed suggestions for the improvement of ethics guidelines and frameworks, and policy briefs with recommendations for the enhancement of EU legal frameworks and with key messages for the ethical governance of new and emerging technologies.
Participation, cooperation, and dissemination were momentous in TechEthos. More than 100 international experts from academia, industry, law, policy, media and the ethics community, and more than 300 European citizens were directly engaged (co-creation, consultation, gamification). Beyond that, we reached out to an overall number of 100.000 individuals in our dissemination and communication activities.
Exploitation has been taking place in forms such as utilization of ethical analysis, frameworks, and guidelines for the revision of the “European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity”; use of project results to enhance the knowledge and skills of various stakeholders, including citizens, researchers, science communicators, and policy makers achieved through exhibitions, serious games, and policy briefs and events; use of the methods and results in ongoing and future research, especially in follow up projects such as XR4Human, iRECs, Re4Green and Co-CREATE; and the consortium partners' exploitation of results, including ethical frameworks, guidelines, and recommendations, across various domains and partner networks.
