Participatory toward Anticipatory (PtA)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aims to instigate a paradigm shift in how we think about technological futures. At present, technologies are often treated as sources of potential harm to be managed by governments and subject experts. But this study takes a different view. Technological choices are social choices, and part of broader sociopolitical and sociocultural phenomena. As such, decisions about technology should be made by society as a whole before these technologies become widely adopted. To explore this, the study uses “Technology Assessment” (TA) as a foundational concept through which collective action on technological choices can take place. Focusing on the Canadian context, the research traces the landscape of TA from past to present. It identifies the Science Council of Canada (SCC) as the key institution in the past and highlights Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and Foresight as today’s main TA-like activities. Through this exploration, the study examines both the challenges and opportunities for establishing a participatory TA mechanism in Canada. Key challenges include the fragmentation of TA functions under the Governor in Council, the historic push to empower the private sector, Canada’s reliance on the U.S., and the dominance of evidence-based policymaking. At the same time, the study also finds promising ground from which participatory TA can begin to take root. These include Canada’s demonstrated readiness from both past and present, its strengthening ties with Europe and its policy models, and a broader shift from evidence-based to mission-driven policymaking. Recognizing these opportunities and the timeliness of the moment, the study proposes a policy deliberation process called Participatory toward Anticipatory (PtA), designed to support public involvement in technological development and policymaking. Finally, the paper concludes with insights from prototype testing of the PtA process, demonstrating how it can enable meaningful public participation in shaping technological futures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".