This article, published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, argues that it would be better to have an international treaty that governs all emerging technologies, instead of separate treaties for each technology.
The article begins as follows:
This past December I was at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis. Several sessions focused on emerging technologies governance. Each presentation nominally focused on one technology, mainly synthetic biology and nanotechnology. But most of the ideas discussed applied equally well to any emerging technology.
One conclusion is that it would be much more efficient and effective to have a single governance regime covering all emerging technologies. Right now there are governance programs for just a handful of technologies that do not come close to covering all the important benefits and risks. A single regime would cover all the technologies and all the issues they pose. A similar conclusion is also reached in a recent law journal paper Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law, written by my Global Catastrophic Risk Institute colleague Grant Wilson, which he summarized at IEET in Emerging technologies: Should they be internationally regulated?
The remainder of the article is available in PDF archive.
Image credits: computer chip: Aler Kiv; electron microscope image of virus: NIAID; molecular machine: Walterdenkens; quantum computer: Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
This blog post was published on 17 April 2024 as part of a website overhaul and backdated to reflect the time of the publication of the work referenced here.