Ethics under Disruption: Can Anticipatory Governance Steer Innovation for the Good?

Current philosophical literature positions socially disruptive innovation as a force that should be regulated and steered through coordinated societal response, anticipatory governance, and even a kind of engineering. To understand what is at stake, in this chapter several distinct meanings of social and moral disruption are distinguished, according to which new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) create severe risks to stakeholders, create interpretive and moral uncertainty, and threaten the breakdown of familiar systems for thinking about and acting upon reality. Then, the philosophical landscape of disruptive innovation in relation to human agency and control is explored. Arguably, breakdowns associated with “ethics under disruption” cannot easily be rationally anticipated and morally acted upon, setting limits to the intelligibility of morally positive, disruptive innovation. Although there is reason to be cautious about the prospects for steering disruption because of the limits of control, categories of proactive strategies for morally positive disruption, such as conceptual engineering, are set forward here.