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European Research Council has awarded a Consolidator Grant (ERC grant) to Laur Kanger, Associate Professor of Technology Research at the University of Tartu, to investigate why future technologies can aggravate environmental problems rather than solve them.
During the Industrial Revolution, numerous perceptions, beliefs, norms and practices emerged in society, significantly accelerating the advancement of science and technology. Collectively, these are referred to as industrial modernity. According to Kanger, the concern is that the above perceptions and beliefs are not adapted to the current situation characterised by the unprecedented technological capability of humanity and scope of environmental problems. For example, industrial societies have tended to patch up issues arising from the use of existing technologies with new and more sophisticated technologies. However, doing the same for recent technologies like solar geoengineering or artificial intelligence would be a very risky approach to tackling the climate crisis because of the speed, scale and uncertainty of resulting impacts.
Three steps to identify the deep sustainability transition
Kanger’s research group will explore the problematic nature of industrial modernity in three ways. First, the evolution of beliefs, norms and behaviours concerning the environment, science and technology over the past 125 years is measured in the world’s 20 largest industrialised countries. As a novel method, digital newspaper archives will be analysed using large language models. In addition to media texts, various databases containing, among other things, legislation, scientific publications and patent information will be used for the analysis. “Our goal is to find out whether there have been major shifts in the perceptions about the environment, science and technology in industrial societies that could mark a rupture in industrial modernity,” Kanger explained.
Through case studies, the research team will then try to identify exactly how the conventional perceptions about science and technology are blocking sustainable solutions. “Over the past 40 years, for example, influential climate models have led to over-optimism about the future availability of nuclear power and carbon capture technology. This has allowed pressing climate policy decisions to be postponed further and further into the future,” Kanger said.
Thirdly, the researchers are trying to identify the countries least hindered by the legacy of industrial modernity and, therefore, having the greatest potential to enact a deep sustainability turn. Building on the team’s prior work, the project will develop an index for measuring this potential, combining existing databases with a novel methodological approach of analysing newspaper texts using large language models. This enables researchers to gain a faster and more comprehensive understanding of public opinion in different countries compared to other text mining techniques. Kanger is hopeful that the use of large language models, if successfully applied, will significantly speed up data analysis without sacrificing too much in accuracy.
19-century assumptions cannot solve today’s problems
Based on the results obtained, a new theory describing the emergence, maturation, and crisis of industrial modernity will be devised. “The problem of today’s society is that we are trying to address 21st-century environmental problems with 19th and 20th-century understandings of science and technology. The new framework will help us recognise these perceptions, learn from history, and possibly take them into account when designing sustainability interventions in the future,” Kanger said.
In addition to Laur Kanger, researchers from the fields of digital humanities, computational social science, transition studies and history are involved in the Rise and Demise of Industrial Modernity project. The project budget is 1.99 million euros, and the research period is five years.
The European Research Council (ERC) supports pioneering research in any field of research across Europe. The Consolidator Grant is awarded to top-level independent researchers to support their career development. ERC received 2,313 proposals in this call for proposals and awarded grants to 328 researchers from 25 countries.
This article was originally published on the webpage of University of Tartu.
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