Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to responsible innovation

Christopher Groves ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGEN), Cardiff University, UK
Grovesc1@cf.ac.uk http://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

Abstract Science and Technology Studies and, in particular, the sociology of expectations has shown in detail how the evolution of emerging technologies is shaped by promises, and the future imaginaries that underlie them. But beyond the specific content of the projected future, there is the act of projecting itself, what we might call our relationship to the future horizon. As Niklas Luhmann notes, [] the essential characteristic of a horizon is that we can never touch it, never get at it, never surpass it, but that in spite of that, it contributes to the definition of the situation. Aside from investigations of particular expectations or imagined futures, we may find that what renders consistent a wide range of imagined futures, technological and otherwise, is how they perform and relate to the future as the horizon of the present how they, for example, empty and commodify it, open it up or close it off, or render it tangible in the present as a latent stake in the hazards of action. Attention to the quality of future-orientation is therefore important because this quality defines how we shall live with uncertainty, whether we amplify or reduce it, and how we inscribe our relationships with future inhabitants of the planet (human and non-human) into our present. Drawing on examples of the future horizons of nanotechnologies, I suggest that sensitization to the implicit future horizons of technological imaginaries can point up central ethical and political contradictions within them, and sketch how a future horizon informed by care ethics can help us think productively about the meaning of responsible innovation, both in nanotechnology and more widely.

Biography

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Chris Groves' work focuses on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future one increasingly imagined against the backdrop of global environmental change and accelerating technological innovation. Along with the ethical and political implications of a range of future-oriented discourses and practices (e.g. risk management, precautionary regulation, building resilience), he examines how our ideas about what it means for individuals and whole societies to take responsibility for their futures are being changed by emerging technologies (such as the convergence between bio- and nanotechnology and personalised genetic testing). The monograph Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill, 2007), coauthored with Professor Barbara Adam (Social Science, Cardiff University), examines these themes in depth.

1. Introduction

Speaking about responsible innovation today, I want to talk about the essential tension within that concept, an at first sight perhaps uncomfortable conjunction of two words. Socially, we are excellent at innovation, but much poorer at understanding and practicing what it might mean to innovate responsibly. Or: making futures is easy, yet doing so responsibly is not. Following some introductory remarks on imaginaries, I want to do three things: (1) examine the sense in which this problem becomes manifest in modernity as an ethical problem of responsibility. (2) sketch a diagnosis of the socio-cultural roots of this problem, which draws on my previous work on nanotechnology and my collaborations with the time theorist, Barbara Adam; and (3) sketch a future direction in which I think our thinking about responsible innovation needs to move.

These three steps will contextualise our use of technology as part of a wider socio-cultural concern - making sense of and giving shape to an uncertain future. Forms of knowledge and regimes of truth, social practices as goal driven activities, ethical frameworks and desire, considered as a socially-organised force, are all equally implicit within this concern. Although the

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examination of imaginaries of the future, defined by Joan Fujimura (2003) as 'visions of future possibilities around which scientific practices and communities are organized' is a contribution understanding how we make sense of an uncertain future, an additional perspective is also needed. Going beyond what I will suggest are problematic metaphors of vision, we need to be able to speak of how societies live the future within the present, of the different styles in which they do this. I want to talk about the concept of a 'future horizon' as a contribution to this project. This is intended both as a response to Fujimura's call for a 'sociology of the future' to study the social determinants of future imaginaries, but also as an attempt to establish a link between STS, on the one hand, and moral and political philosophy on the other. From a sociological analysis of how the uncertain future is domesticated, with the aid of technology and otherwise, we can open up a new ground for ethical and political thought - a critical theory of uncertainty. In this respect, the project I outline here has much in common, methodologically speaking and otherwise, with the approach taken by Peter Paul Verbeek here at Twente on the ethics of technological mediation - a body of work to which I will return in the final section of my talk.

2. Consequentialism and the temptations of foresight

We begin with an analysis of the ethical tension within the idea of responsible innovation. Innovation is inherently a future-creating activity: by bringing something new into the world, it can change the world itself. If we are to explain what responsible innovation is to mean, then we must be able to explain what it means to take responsibility before the event, ex ante, for the future that the activity of innovation helps to create.

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Modernity, as many sociologists from Weber and Durkheim through to Zygmunt Bauman have argued, involves both social differentiation and reintegration: new divisions of labour and the multiplication of social roles, but also attempts to formulate new overarching moral principles. The purpose of these principles was to replace the vanishing moral certainties of the worldview of medieval Europe, which J. B. Schneewind (1984) calls the "divine corporation", with God at the head as its CEO. In the medieval moral frame, what it meant to act responsibly was fixed with an eye on the past, on rules that carried the deontological authority of religious revelation.

But a world in which traditional bonds were being loosened by the rise of science, mercantile and then industrial capitalism, and new political philosophies of equality was, by contrast, increasingly future-oriented - a world that could be improved. Such a world requires a consequentialist morality, where right and wrong are made to depend on outcomes. It is the world of Max Weber's Zweckrationalitt. As Henry S. Richardson has pointed out, the ideal moral agent of this emerging consequentialist age is, therefore, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian subject, a subject who strives to assess, with precision, the contribution each act she performs makes to the aggregate happiness of society. Foresight is the badge of the responsible agent, and scientific, utilitarian precision is offered as the benchmark of good foresight. Vision is the condition of progress, as in the Roco quotation.

The problem is that the perspective of a perfect utilitarian agent is ultimately impossible to adopt, as to overcome uncertainty would require foresight capable of covering the entire span of the consequences of any act. The utilitarian philosopher J. J. C. Smart blithely proposed that, in

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most circumstances, the utilitarian can assume that the "remote effects of his actions tend rapidly to zero, like the ripples on a pond after a stone has been thrown into it" (Smart and Williams 1973, p. 64). This implies that the moral agent has both first and second order responsibilities. Responsible for assessing the consequences of an action, the agent is also responsible for deciding when she must put her futurescope away, as it were, and make up his/her mind to act. Sometimes, as Smart notes, in situations that are relatively routine, this second order responsibility is undemanding. With respect to other activities, however, the opposite is true and technological innovation is one such. An age of innovation and improvisation is also necessarily an age of surprises, some of which are unwanted, as a variety of authors from Edward Tenner to Ulrich Beck have documented.

The problem here is that, to exercise foresight, one must have access to reliable knowledge about the world. The standard of reliability for such knowledge in modernity is generally provided by natural science. However, as Ian Hacking (1986) and others have pointed out, the potential of advanced technologies for creating unforeseen 'interference effects' is written into the way they are emebedded within contemporary societies. Their pervasiveness and proximity to each other creates the likelihood of nasty surprises. Yet, as Luigi Pellizzoni (2004) has observed, according to the legal principle of reasonable foreseeability, an agent can be absolved of liability even if later found to be causally responsible for creating harm, so long as the agent was inescapably ignorant of the potential consequences of his or her actions at the time of acting (Pellizzoni 2004). If the 'state of the art' in science could not have predicted certain consequences at the time of acting, then how can someone be judged responsible for producing them? Yet at the same time, this condition of ignorance is, on Hacking's account, still a form of culpable ignorance. We have become aware, thanks to living in technological societies where phenomena like PCB pollution, asbestos-related

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illnesses and BSE are widespread, that we can expect the unexpected. Nonetheless, how can we take responsibility for avoiding consequences that, even if we suspect they may be in wait for us or others, we cannot foresee?

The idea that foresight is a prerequisite for moral agency is therefore problematic. Metaphors of clear vision, as Robert Romanyshyn (1989) has shown, are a key element within how modernity approaches the future. Yet they help to obscure the reality of the new uncertainties that haunt technological societies. A better metaphor for our situation is perhaps provided by Walter Benjamin's extended riff on Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus: 'The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned...the storm is what we call progress'. Like Klee's angel, we modern consequentialists have our face turned towards the past, even as we think of ourselves as confronting an open future. The 'state of the art' of scientific knowledge is rooted in the past - it is, if you like, a picture of the world as it has existed up until the point where it makes new innovations possible. From this picture, we can extrapolate what the world may be like in the future. But once scientific knowledge hasbeen translated into technology and innovation actual transformative interventions in the world the world as it has hitherto been framed within the lens of science may no longer exist this is, essentially, Hacking's point. Our reliance on science prompts us to imagine the future as 'stationary', in the words of French economist Andre Orlean (2010). In fact, experiences of nasty technological surprises demonstrate that, thanks to innovation, we often find that (as it were) the future is no longer what it used to be.

This is not just a problem of knowledge. Its root is something that Hannah Arendt has identified as an inescapable feature of human finitude. Finitude, the foundation of Schneewind's

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divine corporation, is re-encountered just at the moment when modernitys achievements hold out the prospect of infinite knowledge, infinite progress. In fact, it is precisely the transformative power of technology and scientific knowledge that underlines our finitude, for Arendt. She pointed out that the finitude of humans, the human condition, is not the same as a fixed, immutable human nature. Rather, it depends on the power of humans to remake their world and themselves. What humans beings create through subjective effort takes on an objective form that then conditions their existence in turn (Arendt 1998, 9-10). The production of new futures through innovation changes the conditions of subsequent human action, leading to unanticipated consequences. Even if human beings entirely remodelled themselves through bioengineering, or left the Earth for another planet, they could not escape their fundamental finitude.

So here we have the ethical tension at the heart of responsible innovation. The social use of science promises the transformation of the future, but in transforming it relies on foresight that is nonetheless rooted in hindsight. Yet despite claims that we are now living in 'risk societies' where consciousness is being transformed by awareness of reflexive risk, the illusion of foresight remains something that people in the media, in governance, in business and more widely are firmly wedded to. How and why? I will now address this question, by introducing the concept of future horizons.

3. Living the Empty Future

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Nanotechnology shows us, again and again, evidence of the social power of the foresight metaphor to crystallise debates on responsibility, and evidence also of the seductiveness of future visions through which the intangible is made tantalisingly yet deceptively tangible. Questions as to whether the benefits of nanotechnology will outweigh the risks populate media debates, alongside Eigler's IBM logo spelled out in xenon atoms, nanosubs and bots, and the mechanical metaphors of gears and other widgets through which ideas of bio-engineering are elaborated.

Critics of nanotechnology imaginaries often see in them attempts to give an illusory unity to the messy, multidisciplinary reality of science and technology at the nanoscale. Consequently, they see a need for a politics of imaginaries, an interrogation of future visions and the assumptions on which they rest. Jose Lopez's 2004 article 'Bridging the Gaps' is a classic of this approach. He suggests that future visions of revolutionary nanotechnology rest on a rhetorical remodelling of the past that creates a technologised interpretation of human history. He discusses how K. Eric Drexlers visions of mechanosynthesis, and Mihail Roco and W. S. Bainbridge's account of NBIC convergence both attempt to gather authority for their vision of the future by re-tooling the past along technological determinist lines. For Lopez, the imaginaries of such narratives depict the history of 'human interaction with nature and the development of technology as nothing more than the attempt to manipulate atoms, initially clumsily but increasingly with more precision'.

Such critiques of imaginaries, and how they are used to mobilise legitimacy and frame debates, however, do not touch upon the seductiveness of the idea of foresight as such. Why does the assumption that we are facing the future with open eyes continue to dominate our ideas about responsibility?

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I've explored the need for foresight as a function of historical shifts in ethical frameworks. Now I want to consider a broader range of historical conditions behind its transformation into such a central, organising trope for understanding our relationship with the future. This will take us beyond a preoccupation with imaginaries alone.

Different imaginaries, with nanotechnology as with other technologies, are visions of counterfactual future possibilities. But as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, thinking and imagining the future as a field of counterfactuals achieves prominence only in modernity (Giddens, 1991). Viewing the future in terms of mutually exclusive possible worlds is a necessary support for a consequentialist style of ethics. But how and when did it become possible to think of the future in terms of a collection of possibilities in the first place?

Taking a lead from 'historians of the future' such as Reinhardt Koselleck and Lucian Hlscher, it is possible to see how futurity means different things at different times and in different places, and, as a result, is experienced as making different demand on the present. In other words, the future, as a dimension of the present, has to be thought of as socially constructed. All societies face an uncertain future, but in positioning themselves to confront it, they adopt different stances. They develop and exhibit a range of styles of living the future, different future horizons. Just as future imaginaries may differ widely between societies, or between different groups within a society, so may these styles or horizons. But what they share is that they shape and sustain imaginaries.

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Imaginaries are generally treated as belonging to the symbolic order. Joan Fujimura notes that what distinguishes imaginaries from fantasies is that they are 'collective enterprises and not simply an individual's dreams' (Fujimura, 2003, p. 192). They can function performatively as ways of producing the future in the present within the order of representation, providing what Emilio Mordini calls a 'symbolic template' 'that generates a sense of identity and inclusiveness' (Mordini, 2007, p. 30).

Yet the production and reproduction of imaginaries implies more than just symbolization. It demands that we ask a Foucauldian question: why do some imaginaries get reproduced more widely? At certain times it becomes possible to talk of the future in terms of endless frontiers, the perfectibility of humanity, and so on. The reason lies perhaps in what Foucault, adapting the classical sense of the word, calls ethos, a style of life. Only here it is not the body and self, as in Foucault, that is worked on - but the future as such. It is made into an object of knowledge, of action, and of desire, and becomes a source of ethical demands. From out of this multifaceted labour, imaginative depictions of the future are woven.

A style of living the future, which Barbara Adam and I (2007) have called a future horizon, is therefore an ethos, in Foucaults sense: a heterogeneous set of practices, patterns of desire, forms of knowledge and ethical imperatives which 'hang together' in producing and reproducing social forms in the present. The elements of such an ethos exhibit a certain consistency in how they construct the future as object of knowledge, desire, action and ethics.

This concept of a style of living the future is foreshadowed in Reinhardt Koselleck's notion

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of a 'horizon of expectations' [Erwartungshorizont] (Koselleck, 2002) and Lucian Hlscher's 'future horizon' [Zukunftshorizont] (Hlscher, 1999). Their use of the word horizon resonates with the work of Heidegger and of Gadamer, and its metaphorical value is captured nicely by Niklas Luhmann, who writes that "[...] the essential characteristic of a horizon is that we can never touch it, never get at it, never surpass it, but that in spite of that, it contributes to the definition of the situation" (Luhmann, 1976).

Hlscher documents how early modernity saw a widespread re-organisation of the temporal character of experience, one that made imaginaries, as representations of possible future worlds, possible in the first place. In medieval European culture, he suggests, the future was thought of mostly in terms of the future states or condition of a individual person or thing (Hlscher, 1999, pp. 19-20). From the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, however, European culture manifests the idea of the future as such: a unified realm of potential, interconnected events. Barbara Adam and I have suggested (2007), a number of divergent styles of living this future emerged. These we taxonomised as a set of ideal types: for example, an abstract future, where the future was interpreted as the deterministic product of Newtonian physical laws, an open future, in which the future was the horizon of collective political action, and as the 18th century passed into the19th, an empty future horizon.

It is this empty future horizon, I suggest, which ultimately makes the promises of foresight so seductive. Hlscher documents how such a style of living the future emerges within Europe and the United States towards the end of the 19th century, and then begins to coalesce in new imaginaries. He names the new ethos the "mechanization of the future" [Technisierung der

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Zukunft]. Hlscher identifies the growth of railways as a major influence on how progress began, for the first time, to be conceptualised as a quantitative measure: faster travel realised by new machines, carrying greater numbers of passengers, whole nations crossed in a single day. Whereas the Enlightenment had dreamed of the moral perfection of humanity, the late 19th century dreamed of abundance, realised through myriad avenues of technological ingenuity.

Hlscher identifies certain technologies as a driving force behind the mechanisation of the future. But they play their shaping role amidst a wider confluence of knowledge, action and ethics, within which new forms of expert knowledge have significant influence. The future increasingly becomes constructed to fit within the grids made available by systematic and mathematized forms of knowledge physics (especially thermodynamics), engineering, and economics. The future is increasingly experienced as an empty field of possibilities, but at the same time it becomes a gridded Cartesian space in which specific values can be assigned to particular possibilities.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which emerged in the second half of the 19th century, exemplifies counterfactual, future-oriented expert knowledge. Quantification of potential outcomes, in order to render them commensurable with each other, became an increasingly influential way for State actors to justify policy choices and build consensus for political decisions, as Theodor Porter (1996) has argued. As is revealed in this quotation from CBA pioneer Jules Dupuit, the goal for such thinkers was to dissolve the conflicts of politics into the bureaucratised routines of administrative decision-making. CBA and the spreading use of actuarial practices of risk accounting, in Nikolas Rose's words, 'brought the future into the present and made it calculable' (Rose, 1999, p. 247).

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In the same period as colonial powers were mapping, standardizing and extending frontiers into supposedly 'uncivilised' or 'unoccupied' territories, the future was, as Anthony Giddens suggests (Giddens, 1991, pp. 111-112) also being colonised. The ability to use new forms of knowledge and practice to exercise foresight and plan ahead of the present meant that those social actors, including states, able to leverage these forms and the added legitimacy they brought gained the advantage of decisively shaping the future territory in which others would later have to make decisions and deal with consequences. In the age of the empty future, all were equally able to imagine new possible futures, but in the end, some futures were created more equal than others.

These new practices help to shape the forms in which the new consequentialist ethical imperatives of modernity were made manifest. Utilitarianism and neo-classical microeconomics were translated, as the 19th century passed into the 20th, into the new sub-discipline of welfare economics. Maximising material well-being through an increased satisfaction of individual preferences, became the measure of all social progress.

At the same time, as Hlscher shows, the new style of living the future makes possible imaginaries of plenty, abundance, comfort and so on. I mentioned that desire is a key element in any ethos of the future. Are these imaginaries of plenty where expressions of desire characteristic of the empty future may be found? Things are more complex than this. The empty future manifests desire in two forms. On the one hand, mapping the future driven by the desire to see ahead, to exercise foresight affirms that there is a boundary between ways of acting that are risk aware and rational, and others which are unruly, risk-blind, and dangerous. The desire for a symbolic taming

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of uncertainty to take place is inseparable, however, from an opposed desire, one which finds in accumulation and plenty, not the means of satisfying wants, but instead a compulsion to create more uncertainty, to open up more potential for more and more accumulation. This desire is the death drive at the heart of modernity that Marshall Berman (1983) finds in Goethe's Faust.
In the worlds more advanced industrial countries, development has followed more authentically Faustian forms. Here the tragic dilemmas that Goethe defined have remained urgently in force. It has turned out and Goethe could have predicted it that under the pressures of the modern world economy the process of development must itself go through perpetual development. Where it does, all people, things, institutions and environments that are innovative and avant-garde at one historical moment will become backward and obsolescent in the next. (p. 78)

Mapping the future creates the power to act, but the power to act - to innovate - and to shape the territory in which others will have to live is also a power to create new uncertainties, allowing the symbolic drama of mapping to, in due course, be once again acted out. There is thus a two-sided dynamic of desire that maintains the coherence of the empty future as an ethos, and sustains our attachment to consequentialism, and to foresight, even in the face of nasty surprises. The empty future is the modern frontier spirit: the positing of new certainties in order to transgress them.

Ian Welsh has noted the affective charge associated with the colonisation of the future, which drives innovation beyond the limits of socially ratified rationality, beyond the strictures of cost-benefit analysis, and which is acknowledged here in this statement, made in a time of crisis for the British nuclear industry, by the then head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John Hill,.
I hope we will not lose all sense of striving for the future or of interest in the undiscovered, nor refuse to make any journey unless every step can be counted and measured in advance. The road to successful and economic

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power stations is uncharted. I hope we can maintain our resolve to continue the exploration. (Sir John Hill, speaking in 1971).

The need for more efficient techniques, for increased satisfaction of preferences, also creates a desire for novelty for its own sake, even if it is costly and a step into 'uncharted territory'. The same dynamic of desire can be seen at work with respect to nanotechnology, conceived of as the 'new new thing', in Richard Jones' words (Jones 2011). At work within the 'empty future's' imaginaries of abundance and progress, then, there is something deeper: rational assessment of risk accompanies a wider, non-rationalisable dynamic of development for development's sake. The seduction of foresight, and the tension within the concept of responsible innovation lie in how an empty future ethos couples a desire for rationalised autonomy to a desire for the 'new new thing'. It is thus the empty future, as an unquestioned style of living the future (and which contains a variety of heterogeneous elements), which is the real obstacle to a coherent concept of future-oriented responsibility.

4. Conclusion: Horizons of Care The modern emphasis on foresight, I have suggested, clouds the reality of how uncertainty is experienced but also of how it is, as the same time, a source of value in industrial and postindustrial societies. As I suggested earlier, technological societies confirm the reality of human finitude. Now we have seen how they also hold out the lure of infinity - of living an empty future, a vacant space of pure potential. The quotation from Timothy Mitchell here reveals only half the problem: the uncertainty caused by the quest for certainty is, though troubling, an excess within modernity which, despite destabilising it, nonetheless also sustains it. To ease the tension within the concept of responsible innovation, we need an ethos, a style of living the future that is more appropriate to our rediscovered finitude. Academic and policy

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discourses that attempt to articulate what responsible innovation might mean have begun to approach this problem. 'Responsiveness' (von Schomberg 2011), and other similar concepts have been invoked in order to emphasize that the views of a range of social actors outside the innovation process have to find an effective position within it, in order to shape the direction of innovation in ways that meet social needs. An epistemology of multiple perspectives is often called for, both as a way of exposing potential hazards which might have been overlooked from dominant scientific and policy perspectives, and as a way of articulating explicitly what a wide range of stakeholders want from innovation. Bringing multiple perspectives to bear in the social assessment of technologies thus allows the imaginaries invoked by boosters of new technologies to be interrogated. An epistemology of multiple perspectives implicitly acknowledges finitude, both by pointing to the limitations of scientific foresight, and by recognising that innovation takes place against a backdrop of sometimes incommensurable and competing values, rather than being answerable only to the value of efficiency or maximisation. How far does it acknowledge, though, how closely the desire for control and the desire for new uncertainty are bound together within the institutions and practices at the heart of technological innovation? In closing, I want to suggest some ways in which a different ethos needs to be more explicitly articulated for responsible innovation, one that acknowledges the enduring presence of the empty future as a style of life and that seeks to cultivate a different style, beginning from within this problematic ethos. I have argued elsewhere {Groves 2011} that, implicit in feminist discussions of care can be found a different style of living the future. Feminist ethicists, notably Sara Ruddick and Joan Tronto, have argued that doing moral philosophy through the lens of care is less a question of finding different foundations for morality, and more a matter of changing the

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relationship between moral theory and practice. Ethics and politics, for that matter for care theorists, become less about how and why to apply moral principles and more about cultivating attitudes, dispositions and capacities in the terms introduced by my talk, forms of knowledge, practice, and ethical guidelines as core elements of a future horizon that are suited to protecting and sustaining human relationships in the face of uncertainty and insecurity. Beginning from parental and other forms of personal care, care ethicists highlight the role of listening, intuition, attentiveness to what others need in order to flourish, and tending to these needs. But care, as an ethical perspective, also leads to other forms of social action, designed to build social structures and institutions which embody solidarity and mutual risk-sharing across time, as Tronto and other feminists concerned with the political significance of care, such as Eva Kittay and Fiona Robinson, have argued. The theory and practice of care constructs the future as the totality of the singular futures of others we care about, together with the conditions of their flourishing very different to an untenanted future of pure possibility to be seized and colonised at will. In relation to technology, the idea of care offers a different starting point for thinking about responsibility, and one that connects with the analysis of technological artefacts offered by Peter-Paul Verbeek (2011). Verbeek, echoing Arendt's account of finitude, sees technology as morally significant because of the ways in which it conditions human agency. Design, for Verbeek, is therefore an inherently moral activity as it aims to embed within technological artefacts qualities that are actively designed to positively enhance specific forms of human life. Verbeek presents his ethics as a kind of 'good life' ethics of technology, a technologically-mediated vision of eudaimonia. If we consider this perspective through the lens of care, then it can help develop an

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alternative way of thinking about the part played by desire in living the future. The qualities we need to seek in technological artefacts might be ones that enhance human capacities to flourish in the face of uncertainties and surprises. In place of the coupled impulses of future-mapping and the desire for the new new, both of which are rooted in the urge to quantify the future, we might find a desire for the qualitative enhancement of values that stand for the resilience and flourishing of richer forms of life. Technology would then become a tool of care, a way of promoting solidarity and risk sharing, for example, rather than just the satisfaction of individual preferences. Examining a technology within the context of a 'good life' ethics of care suited to human finitude would base itself on the recognition technology is not, in and of itself, essentially alienating, destructive or dehumanising. Aware of the seductions of foresight, and the dynamics awakened by them, a future horizon of care would aim to actively culture technologies as part of assemblages of knowledge, practice, ethics and desire in which the primacy accorded to foresightbased knowledge within the ethos of the empty future is transferred to the ethical goal of flourishing and the diverse forms of knowledge needed to support it.

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