CONCEPT
Technologies of Hubris
Sheila Jasanoff's term for the governance instruments—quantitative risk assessments, cost-benefit analyses, expert-dominated decision processes—that produce genuine knowledge while systematically overestimating what can be known and underestimating what cannot.
Technologies of hubris are not useless. This is the crucial, carefully placed acknowledgment in
Sheila Jasanoff's foundational 2003 essay, which introduced both the concept and its prescribed antidote,
technologies of humility. Quantitative risk assessment is a genuine achievement. It forced disciplines of rigor onto questions about environmental contamination and pharmaceutical safety that had previously been answered by intuition or interest. Cost-benefit analysis made consequences legible in terms that legislatures and courts could act on. Expert-dominated decision processes concentrated relevant knowledge and protected it from political manipulation. These are real goods. The problem Jasanoff identifies is structural rather than motivational: technologies of hubris produce knowledge within a framework that transforms unmeasurable uncertainty into measurable risk, and treats the transformation as an achievement rather than an assumption. The untransformed residue—what cannot be assigned probabilities, what cannot be captured in a risk matrix, what is genuinely uncertain rather than merely unquantified—is treated as though it does not exist. For AI governance, this residue is not peripheral. The slow