Articles urge us to harness technology, to streamline the process, to keep generating ideas. We worship the progress, and the results are astonishing indeed: economic opportunities abound, infrastructure development thrives and accessibility grows. But doesn’t automation incur job losses, isn’t technology posing a threat to national and global security while our data becomes more sensitive? With our lives, jobs, health and freedoms being at stake, isn’t the price too high? Some may think.

There is hardly any emerging technology that would not cause public concern regarding transparency, consent, fairness and the potential for misuse of personal data.

These are some of the many examples, demonstrating the importance of disruptive technologies being subject to responsible development.

Considering Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications (ELSI) within the R&D process allows to mitigate risks by ensuring that this is not only the law that the projects comply with but the basic needs and rights of humanity. Proactively addressing possible threats may have a profound impact on maximizing benefits and opportunities and minimizing harms.

Although initially referred to genetics and genomics, with the majority of projects covering societal issues in life sciences, ELSI research has grown into a global field of study. The term evolved as well: to ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) in the EU and RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) worldwide (yet, ELSI is still more commonly used), encouraging inventors to consider and address potential side effects, alongside gathering data that policy-makers would need to ensure regulatory compliance. Some examples include:

Three initiatives in particular integrate ELSI throughout the program lifecycle: Safe Genes, protecting the service members from accidental or intentional misuse of genome editing technologies, URSA, enabling improved techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments, and ITM, supporting the development of algorithms that make independent decisions in difficult domains.

All the above organizations have one thing in common: they incorporate ELSI practice into the design process, focusing on early integration and stakeholder engagement.

For instance, in 2023 DARPA introduced its first ELSI Visiting Scholar program, aiming to create a culture and cultivate mindsets of ELSI, with a view to ingrain responsibility issues in the development process. According to Dr. Rebecca Crootof – the inaugural ELSI Visiting Scholar, encouraging researchers to think more broadly about the program’s impacts has already borne fruit, with employees not only discovering potential risks through conversations, but them coming up with ideas on how to make the outcome even more practical and useful.

This happened to a DARPA program manager who realized his project, facing the challenge of communications’ deprived environments, could have been extremely beneficial for addressing broadband equity issues, if designed from the early stages.

But let’s proceed with the major steps organizations take to launch and guide the process.

Regardless of the technology a team, company or organization works on, there is a number of common strategies to adhere to while first launching ELSI initiatives.

To measure ELSI effectiveness, specific metrics might be of help:

Though hard to estimate, economic impact, measuring cost savings, and public trust and engagement, pushing the company’s market capitalisation forward, should not be disregarded as well.

With the emerging breakthrough solutions contradicting social, economic and political aspects of human life, the diverse knowledge base and varied perspectives are required to tackle their broad applications. ELSI empowers people to solve intractable problems without foreseeable misuses being neglected, and the least we can do is to start considering those implications while designing national and private R&D programs.