Studies in National Governance and Emerging Technologies

From genome editing to deep learning, and from blockchain to quantum computing, the rise of emerging technologies poses a number of opportunities, threats and risks to society. Emerging technologies provide affordances to innovative products and services that can potentially revolutionize fields like medicine, transport and finance. They may also result, however, in unwelcome side-effects, unintended consequences and deliberate harms to particular groups and individuals, as well as entire systems and the environment. Questions about whether emerging technologies should be regulated at the national level, and how precisely governments should encourage and respond to them, are controversial. Precautionary approaches may discourage investment and make countries lose ground with respect to other economies. Permissive regimes may put consumers and natural environments at risk. Governments, business firms and the civil society are expected to play a role in (re-)designing how emerging technologies will be regulated, re-regulated and steered.