Governing Emerging Technologies – The need to think outside the (black) box

The idiom of emergence has somehow colonized the public sphere. We live in ‘liquid societies’ where change and adaptation have become routine. Science and technology are the main pillars of this state of permanent change, and they are themselves colonized by the idiom of emergence. In such a context, emerging technologies are a key object of research for STS scholars. Against this background, the objective of this paper is to address the theme ‘governing emerging technologies’ in a reflexive way and to reflect on the politics of ‘emerging technologies’, starting with the identification of what is made invisible, namely power relations.This paper discusses different stream of analysis (Social control of technology, constructive Technology Assessment, Anticipatory Governance) and then proposes a strong coproductionist approach to emerging technology. This approach draws on two key methodological principles. First, the heuristic of continuity, is designed to overcome the tyranny of novelty, namely the focus on uncertainty and what we do not know. The second principle, the variation of scales of analysis, aims at considering drivers of emergence which play at the level of the systems, without losing the benefits of micro-analysis