Author: Dr Natasha McCarthy, Associate Director, Policy at the Royal Academy of Engineering
Transformative technologies – emerging, rapidly evolving and deep tech – have the potential to transform people’s lives in fundamental and widespread ways. These technologies might directly impact the public, in the ways that AI has become an underpinning technology in many everyday services and a product that is now widely used. Or they may unlock research breakthroughs, or enable other technologies that can have a wide societal impact, from drug discovery to interventions to support the adaptation of the environment to the effects of climate change.
The potential for positive impact creates a meaningful opportunity to engage with the public on future applications that will improve lives. Bringing public voice into research programmes in transformative tech can ensure that those applications genuinely meet the needs of diverse communities across society. But any rapidly evolving technology – especially those with potential widespread application – can bring risk, to safety of people, to the environment and to societal systems. And, according to the 2025 Public Attitudes to Science survey, trust in science and those who create it has eroded since the pandemic. It is therefore essential that public voice and wider civil society play a role in stewarding these technologies so that risks are managed and communities are not adversely affected. Only by meaningful public discussion, and by communicating the fact that this discussion is taking place, can trust in such technologies be established.
But these technologies develop in unpredictable ways, and the pace of change can be hard to foresee. This can create challenges in terms of establishing dialogue that is meaningful and tangible for public participants, so that they can engage with issues with good understanding and positive engagement. There is also a risk of engaging early and then letting technologies continue to develop, rather than continuing to engage as new opportunities and risks emerge. How do we do this, when the tech might rapidly become diffuse, with multiple research organisations and businesses using and developing it?
The roundtable surfaced a number of further questions about how meaningful dialogue can be established in transformative technologies. These are technologies that can have fundamental and widely dispersed impact. This calls for long term, and large-scale dialogue and engagement. But this can be challenging within traditional research funding. This also raises the question of how dialogue is valued by researchers and funders. How is the value of these dialogues for researcher and innovators defined, measured, ensured? And how is it defined for the public participants?
It was clear that there was need for embedding a culture of dialogue into research funding and practice, to support long term and meaningful engagement. Supporting this at scale could involve more standing panels or longer-running assemblies, and using digital platforms for wider participation in dialogue. Ways to fund and support that should be woven into how transformative tech research funds are designed and administered. A joined-up approach to accessing insight from dialogues, creating the means to access the many dialogue activities that take place, will enhance the value of small-scale dialogues by connecting them together to develop bigger pictures. Linking dialogue techniques with futures thinking can enable meaningful dialogue even at the earlier stages of tech development, providing a foundation for long term dialogue throughout the R&D lifecycle. Achieving this, and communicating that this has been achieved, can give publics more assurance that technologies are being developed with the sustained and meaningful input from a range of voices.
At the Royal Academy of Engineering we are establishing a Futures and Dialogue practice, bringing public voice into our work from public panels informing our whole Academy Strategy, through to bringing public voice into our Enterprise Hub, a leading tech accelerator, through a series of People’s AI Stewardship Summits. Chairing this round table was a pleasure as it brought together key stakeholders to work through how we can establish public dialogue in the technologies that will have transformative effects. Sharing what we do, with those who lead long-standing public dialogue programmes, enables us to develop and evolve our work. This kind of joint thinking and learning across all the organisations involved will help support the culture shift towards valuing public voice as essential to the development of future technologies.
