Understanding Technological Hype

As modern society changes, so does scientific practice. Today, the public’s call for reliably forecasting the future gets noticeably louder. Forecasts are economically and politically demanded to foster global competitiveness and planning certainty, as well as to assess the risks and consequences which accompany technological progress. But science is nowadays expected to not only predict the behaviour of complex systems and hereby to forecast the social and technological future, but also to play a constructive role in shaping it. According to Nordmann, this resulted in the emergence of a new form of scientific praxis: Techno-sciences. Techno-sciences are defined by their virtual conflation of theoretical abstraction and technological intervention in the material world. Examples would be nanotechnology, biotechnology, or geoengineering. The genuine goal of techno-sciences is no longer to pursue Enlightenment, but to search for the most ground-breaking enhancements to the material world possible and, of course, to commercialize them. Widespread amendments to patent law (e.g., the U.S. Bayh-Dole-Act) have thereby set the legal stage. While scientometrics already allows to assess scientific impact well, it is still hardly possible to comparatively determine the expectable social and economic impact of techno-science’s yield. Therefore, expectable impact is often examined in case studies or in worse cases, postulated or rather guessed.

Consequently, the demand to forecast the future by predicting complex systems, plus hard to measure social impact lead to another frequently noted characteristic of contemporary sciences: hype. While hype is considered by some as now inevitable and others criticize this phenomenon in depth, I will argue that from an analytical point of view, one should focus less on hype and more on the politics of visions.

Expectations about the social impact of technologies are often based on scientific predictions and represent a link between the public and scientific spheres. Expectations are important, first because they publicly legitimize scientific activities which provide reliable socio-technical forecasts of the future. Secondly, this guarantees the continued existence of research programs by attracting financial resources and political and public support. Expectations moreover promote public legitimization, authoritativeness and hence compliance with “science-based” political decision-making. Finally, widely shared expectations about technologies’ social impact are performative, as relevant social, political and economic actors adapt to the anticipated situation, which makes its predicted outcome in turn more likely. Expectations thus become self-fulfilling and materially manifested. Hence, the public demand for reliably forecasting the future and the productive aspirations of technoscientific predictions are eventually converging in the expectations they produce. The continuum of Hype in technological predictions between reproduction of facts and excessive exaggeration According to Brown, technological hype can be understood as rigid and disproportionately exaggerated expectations of technologies’ impact in terms of benefits and risks. Master and Resnik thereby conceive the phenomenon of hype as a continuum between scientific accuracy and publicity in scientific predictions of the future. Interestingly though, predictions must always contain at least a bit of interpretation and simplification in order to achieve publicity and hence to actually become widely held expectations. Additionally, Nerlich notes that hype does not only depend on the exaggeration of scientific facts, but also has a narrative dimension. Accordingly, the publicity of predictions also depends on their potential to convey a convincing and consistent story. There are several possible approaches to the question of what the problem with hype is, which will be elucidated in the following.

Hype as a form of scientific malpractice

Criticism that views hype as scientific malpractice often assumes the motivation to hype lies in the scientists’ urge to maintain public support in a climate of increasing competition for financial resources, publicity and technological promises. As a result, scientists are systematically seduced into emphasizing the benefits of their research and concealing the possibility of unintended consequences. Moreover, in the age of technosciences, researchers would be also passionate about attaining psychological and social reward by counting themselves among a potentially revolutionary field of research. Together, this logic is aptly summarized in Harro Van Lente’s description of the promise-requirement circle according to which predictions made by a scientist also function as a promise in a social contract between the scientists and the wider public. In this contract, the scientists, in exchange for the appreciation of their performance, are to deliver on their promises by proactively working on fulfilling them. Since the results are likely to differ from the original predictions, they, in order to save face, would be inclined to make new promises and thus to perpetuate technological progress.

One common criticism primarily directed to those scientists who keep up the hype is the concern that they would damage the reputation and public trust in science. STS-scholars thereby argue that public distrust originates from temporal and socio-spatial disparities of expectation. Temporally, hype feeds on the exaggeration of the future and the stigmatization of the past. Since the images of the future that develop from predictions are constantly changing with scientific progress, inaccurateness of former predictions becomes inevitable. The difference between predictions and their subsequent relativization thereby correlates with the public’s disappointment of the previously raised expectations. Since it has already adjusted to these expectations, the consequence is raising distrust in science. Socio-spatially, susceptibility to hype and hence potential disappointment differs between societal groups. While some actors with more information and knowledge may anticipate hype and adjust their investments and trust more accurately, this is probably not possible for ordinary consumers. Consequently, the latter are potentially more affected by hype and by losing trust in science. Moreover, technological hype would also harm scientists in the long run, as premature disappointments and public disengagement potentially frustrates further research of technologies that would otherwise benefit from long-term support.

Building on this concept of socio-spatial disparity of hype, other possible critical inequality effects supposedly arise from hype. First, scientists in coalition with political and economic actors with more accurate knowledge and information, could by means of hype direct attention and resources to aims they perceive as more relevant and useful for them. In consequence, to the detriment of the broader public, the allocation of science funding resources would potentially be less beneficial to more universalistic goals such as public education and health, infrastructure, or sustainability (Stilgoe 2020: 51). Secondly, the same actors would allegedly also foster the premature economization of technologies with unintended long-term social or ecological consequences being hyped away. Finally, hype would artificially generate concerns about technological risks that may seem theoretically appropriate but have little practical relevance and instead displace discourses which are more important for the general public in the short and medium term. In summary, this would support Woodhouse and Sarewitz’s postulate that technoscientific progress in a non-egalitarian social world will be disproportionately beneficial to the advantaged and affluent. 

However, there is some reservation against such criticism of hype. First, the portrayal of an unknowing and manipulable public implicitly employs the „public-deficit model”, according to which the general public’s declining trust and opposition is due to a lack of knowledge and comprehension of science and is thus primarily a problem of scientific communication. Accordingly, if scientists and technologists would only resist the temptation of exaggeration or of being instrumentalized by political and economic actors for this purpose, the problems of hype could be containable. The incompleteness of this approach can be shown empirically. In their empirical recapitulation, Master and Resnik found a broad concordance that losses of general public’s trust in sciences due to unmet expectations are not systematically related to respondents‘ level of knowledge. In contrast, respondents were more sympathetic to erroneous exaggeration and more severe towards hype than originally expected. Increasing distrust is, if ever, more likely to occur in particularly affected groups. Secondly, hype and public trust in science are instead multifaceted and complex concepts which are not attributable to single actors like scientists. Accordingly, one would have to broaden the analytical focus to also consider the interests of miscellaneous actors within the academic publication process, different political and social institutions, or the media. Finally, tracing back accountability of hype’s inequality effects is therefore complicated as well and, if it all, only possible in single cases. It is therefore hard to state whether hype is a form of scientific malpractice, because it is hard to hold anyone accountable for its alleged consequences and because it seems to be intrinsic to today’s scientific practice and communication.

The diffuse nature of technological hype

This problem of lacking accountability is reflected in the aforementioned narrative dimension of hype. Inspired by Foucault’s idea of knowledge regimes, Nordmann and Schwartz describe the phenomenon of hype as associated with the technoscientific age’s seduction to revolutionary application of technologies which evokes a more diffuse form of power through rhetorical forms and narratives. They sarcastically summarize hype as “mutually reinforcing empty talk”. Using nanotechnology as an example, they show that in a diffuse process of social shaping, concepts with only vague original meaning eventually become assembled through means of rhetorical figures and ideographic fictions, i.e. widely accepted wisdoms. These means would thereby have a “seductive power”, they enforce general approval towards the hyped concepts. Rhetorical figures would be, for example, the argumentative pinning down on speculative moral dilemmas, the allegation of backwardness, or the assumption of predictive equiprobability, i.e. the belief that scenarios must be considered as long as they cannot be refuted. Ideographs, on the other hand, would be the idea of the incomplete human being depending on technological enhancement, technological progress as a value in itself or the mantra of exponential growth (e.g. Moore’s Law). Considering this aspect of hype, there remains to either accept and instrumentalize the seemingly inevitable diffuse social dynamic of hype, or to readjust the focus from predictions and expectations towards the present.

An instrumental account on hype

Because of its lack of accountability and intelligibleness as well as the multiplicity of individual incentives to promote hype, scholars have recently started to take hype as a “necessary evil” and to emphasize its instrumental utility instead. The idea here is to use hype as a basis for anticipatory governance. According to Guston, the goal of anticipation is to create „anticipatory knowledge“ by including the expectations of a broader public into the scientific process. This would not only sensitize scientists to the socio-technical consequences of their predictions but would also give the general public the opportunity to intervene and participate more proactively in at least a part of the development of general expectations and hype. To realize this claim, Nerlich refers to the example of extended peer reviews in which non-scientific peers in citizen juries or focus groups receive papers for review and criticism before publication. It can thereby at least be determined whether „honest hype“ (p.43) is present, as she shows with the example of the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at CERN.

But even such an anticipatory account on hype requires simplifications which are worthy of criticism. According to Nordmann, anticipation on the basis of currently prevalent ideals and the available body of knowledge of the future is inadequate. First, we cannot know whether we can prepare ourselves for the future more appropriate by gaining more extensive anticipatory knowledge. We would thereby have to assume that the future is already contained in the currently conducted research programs and hyped technologies. We would have to be conscious of the hype, and if we could be, why not just quit hyping instead of anticipating hype? We can hence only prepare for scenarios that we can imagine based on the world as we know it, and following the wisdom of „history repeats itself,“ we would thereby probably unconsciously draw on outdated knowledge and beliefs which we accumulated in the past. Secondly, the proactive inclusion of today’s existing values in expectations is also problematic since we would be adopting a patronizing attitude towards the future world, although we cannot know all the prospective framework conditions which are necessary to make such ethical statements. We would thus, by embracing the performative quality of expectations and hype, delude ourselves into thinking that the future is a product of our moral and technical control.

Is hype unavoidable? The Dilemma of Hype

Consequently, we can neither trace the phenomenon of hype back to the misbehaviour of specific actors, nor can we satisfyingly control this seemingly inevitable dynamic or instrumentalize it in a democratic-anticipatory spirit,  since we simply lack the necessary knowledge, i.e. to what extent hype is justified and what we can conclude from it for the future.

The essence of this apparent dilemma was already reflected in Brown’s description of the hype dilemma according to which it is impossible to solidify our expectations of the future by either methodically and politically eliminating or productively harnessing the phenomena of hype because we simply lack the ability to place ourselves outside the world of our own subjective expectations. Already in the process of devoting ourselves to an expectation, we decide at the same time against other possibly reasonable expectations: „I select, therefore I hype“. Consequently, if our expectations come into effect, we have predicted and therefore anticipated correctly. However, if our expectations turn out to be wrong, we are losing since we erroneously hyped. As shown before, we cannot even be certain whether wrong expectations are based on incorrect factual conclusions or just on the seductive power of narratives and rhetorical figures. And yet we would be bound to detect erroneously exaggerated expectations as early as possible in order to adjust them in time – but not too early since we would otherwise potentially loose the benefits in case the expectations were justified after all.

Regarding the problem structure, this dilemma is thereby similar to the dilemma of control which was formulated already earlier by Collingridge. Following this, the potentially harmful unintended consequences of a socio-technological change only become reliably recognizable when it is already too late and too resource demanding to correct them in the aftermath. If one tries instead to intervene too early, the respective socio-technical change has barely taken place yet, which is why both the factual and the moral mandate are missing: the justification would not be distinguishable from mere hype. Collingridge concludes from his dilemma that the possibility to change a technology in order to control its socio-technical consequences should be reserved for as long as possible. In contrast, Nordmann noted in a later essay, that the initial situation formed in the dilemmas listed above is bizarre since they necessarily amount to find the perfectly right now between an unchangeable past and an uncertain future in order to correct exaggerated expectations or rectify unintended consequences. Instead, he notes, there may also be the possibility of deliberating on questions of scientific and technological progress without being trapped into wanting to predict the future.

Escaping the Hype-Dilemma by concentrating on visions

Using the example of Ray Kurzweil’s staggering and erroneous „predictions“ about the future of artificial intelligence in his book „The Age of Spiritual Machines“, Sand and Schneider made clear that the basis of exaggerated expectations a.k.a. hype may actually be visions disguised as predictions. Accordingly, techno-scientists have visions of the future based on the potentials they see in their inventions. With the help of political, economic and medial actors, they want to expand their visions eventually into socio-technical imaginaries following Sheila Jasanoff’s description: „collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life“. “Visioneering” thereby takes a role similar to the supposedly scientific fact-based predicting, i.e. providing the basis of expectations, which in turn, by increasing public and financial support, bring about their more or less satisfactory realization. The crucial advantage of this conceptual division is however that it shifts the basis of our expectations from trying to scientifically predict the future to examining the contemporary debates about what a desirable future is. From an analytical point of view, this separation of terms can free us from the constant temptation to repeatedly engage in speculations disguised as predictions of the consequences of today’s emerging technologies and rather to understand the underlying desires and concerns as socio-technical potentials that are being currently discussed. Nordmann has therefore succinctly called this analytical focus „forensics of wishes“. For example, Lösch applied this approach when they revealed and compared different patterns of „responsibilization“ during vision-making, i.e. different allocations of responsibilities resulting from debates around socio-technical visions. This approach on responsible innovation would avoid the speculative and futile debate of trying to find the responsibility of individual actors for predicted developments, or of directly making a technology itself responsible for unpopular consequences.