El reto de la evaluación del impacto social de la tecnología en España

Abstract

The strong interaction between technological processes and society requires the implementation of a series of practices that allow the assessment of the social impact of the technology created and/or used in a country. As a result of this need, a significant amount of experiences and studies has appeared in the international context and, in a less extend, in Spain. The aim of this paper is to analyse the incorporation of social impact assessment of technology in the Spanish context and, hence, to identify future trends of action in this area. Therefore, firstly, we introduce several concepts that allow limiting the scope of the social impact assessment of the technological activities and projects. Secondly, after a brief evaluation of the deployment of social impact assessment of technological activities and projects in our country, we extend the scope of analysis in order to describe various lines of work developed in Spain that are related to this type of assessment. Based on the previous review, we compare these contributions to conclude that the Spanish studies on the social impact assessment of technology are characterized by the existence of some heterogeneous inputs with different approaches, different levels of adoption and consolidation and different degrees of public sector involvement. In general, the level of development of the evaluation of the social impact assessment of technological activities and projects is relatively weak.