Technologies of Humility

Technologies of humility are institutional practices designed to acknowledge the limits of prediction, incorporate diverse knowledge, and create governance mechanisms that can detect and respond to emergent consequences. Introduced by Jasanoff in 2003 as a counterpoint to 'technologies of hubris' — the quantitative risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses that dominate technology governance — the framework consists of four components. Framing asks how a problem is defined and what definitions exclude. Vulnerability asks who is most exposed to harm and how they differ from the populations designers imagined. Distribution asks who benefits and who bears costs. Learning asks how institutions detect their own errors and revise course. Together, these practices constitute an institutional posture capable of governing technologies whose most important consequences are uncertain — not merely unknown but unknowable in advance, emerging from interactions no model can capture.