新兴技术风险评估中的风险性和不确定性

Identifying Risk and Uncertainty in the Risk Assessments of the Emerging Technologies

在技术的风险评估中,人们首先往往要确定环境条件是有风险的,还是不确定有风险的。尤其是在新兴高技术不断涌现的环境下,人们通常没有足够的信息对决策环境做出明确的分类。本文以碳纳米管的风险评估作为案例指出,对高技术的风险评估,关键的要素是技术发展判断和结果预见。因此,在对新兴技术风险进行定量评估的同时,应持有适当的风险怀疑态度,最好能够考虑到不确定性条件下风险评估的决策策略,由此可以划分为风险性条件下的决策和不确定性条件下的决策。两点值得考虑的建议是:第一,加强决策的现实化和逼真度,在某种意义上,可以将决策选择作为现实世界的实验来看待;第二,加强对决策环境定量信息的审议,建立多方参与的风险评定和决策选择机制。

In the in risk assessments of the emerging technologies,it is important to drew a distinction between decision-making under risk and decision-making under uncertainty,however,it is argued that there has not been enough attention to the difficulties involved in categorizing decision situations into these two kinds.Using the risk assessment of carbon nanotubes as an example,we show that it is often indistinct whether there is adequate information to classify one decision situation as being under risk as opposed to uncertainty.In response to these challenges,we argues for taking decision-making strategies that contain quantitative estimates of risk but that deal them with appropriate skepticism.The paper concludes by providing two proposals for responding to these difficulties,regarding decisions as real-world experiments and facilitating broadly based deliberation about quantitative information.