Professor Roger Brownsword will deliver a public lecture on

Regulating Emerging Technologies: A Challenge for Law, a Challenge for Ethics, a Challenge for Everyone

in the Trinity Long Room Hub, on Wednesday 11 March 2015 at 6:30pm.

In this public lecture, organised by the Confederal School of Religions, Peace Studies and Theology, the School of Law, and the Ethics and Privacy Working Group of the ADAPT centre, at Trinity College Dublin, Professor Brownsword will consider the regulation of emerging technologies. In particular, they are not easily regulated: getting the regulatory environment right is a considerable challenge. Legal frameworks tend to lose connection with their technological targets; even when connected, laws are often relatively ineffective; and ethicists are unable to agree on the interpretation and application of respect for human rights and human dignity as the measure of regulatory legitimacy. At the same time, new technologies insinuate themselves into the regulatory environment as tools that promise greater effectiveness. In a context of rapid technological change coupled with deep regulatory uncertainty, it will be suggested that the priorities are to safeguard the integrity of the infrastructure for human life, to preserve the conditions in which communities with moral aspirations may flourish, and to encourage broader and more inclusive debates about the social licence to be given to modern technologies.

Roger Brownsword is Professor of Law at King’s College London, where he was the founding director of TELOS (a research centre that focuses on technology, ethics, law and society), an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield, and a visiting professor at Singapore Management University. He has published more than a dozen books. From 2004-2010, he was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics; and currently, he is Chair of the Ethics and Governance Council of UK Biobank and a member of the Advisory Board of HELEX (the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies, in the University of Oxford). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Modern Law Review; and he is the founding general editor, with Han Somsen, of the Journal, Law, Innovation and Technology.