Brey’s proposal for an anticipatory ethics may be seen as a reply to this challenge. The concern of anticipation can also be one of the central issues in the more recent interdisciplinary area of responsible innovation (e.g., Owen et al. 2013). Political approaches to technology mostly return to Marx, who assumed that the material construction of manufacturing in society, by which technology is clearly a vital component, determined the financial and social construction of that society. Similarly, Langdon Winner has argued that applied sciences can embody particular types of power and authority .
Technical norms must be distinguished from anankastic statements expressing pure necessity, of the shape ‘If X is to be achieved,Y needs to be done’; the latter have a fact worth but the former haven’t. Von Wright himself, nonetheless, wrote that he did not understand the mutual relations between these statements. Employment in computer and knowledge technology occupations …