6G is envisioned as one of the key digital infrastructures of the future: a backbone for increasingly interconnected societies and an enabling infrastructure not only for the exchange of information. As the technological infrastructure itself is being designed, potential applications are also being envisaged across different sectoral areas such as healthcare, agriculture, energy and many others. But designing a technology of this scale raises a fundamental question: what does it mean to take its social dimension into account?
At CyberSocial Lab., our work focuses on helping to bring this question to the surface. Working alongside the telecommunications industry, We explore what the “social aspects” of emerging technologies actually are, what they mean in practice, that is, how they can be taken into account throughout the process of technology design, for a sustainable 6G infrastructure.
The social dimension of 6G concerns the ways in which technological development trajectories interact with impacts, needs, values, interests and priorities. This interaction can generate tensions and conflicts, but it can also create forms of positive reinforcement, when technological development supports socially valued goals and contributes to addressing relevant needs.
Being able to understand and steer with awareness this relationship can make the difference between two very different futures: one that is primarily emanation of technology-related logics and industry-driven objectives, and another in which technology design follows a reflection on social objectives. We are aiming for the latter. The former, to a large extent, is the trajectory we are already experiencing.
What follows is an introductory list of the main concepts we are examining in our work, highlighting the way they are deeply interconnected with one another.
Technologies are never developed in a social vacuum. Values shape technological development, sometimes implicitly and sometimes deliberately. Implicitly, values can enter technology design through cultural assumptions that are taken for granted and remain unquestioned. For example, the pursuit of ever-increasing connectivity has been so far treated as an unquestionable good and an ultimate social value, informing technology development and policy targets.
This raises important questions and calls for a perspective exercise. What constitutes a value for someone, does not for another. And if only a limited share of the population is in charge of imagining what is important (valuable) and, even more, how technological development shall embody what is valuable, we will most probably build a society that reflects interests of a few. The values and priorities of other social groups may then be subordinated to what has come to be treated as an unquestionable value. In doing so, the discussion around alternative development trajectories is narrowed or marginalised, and technological development risks reinforcing existing priorities rather than opening up possibilities for different futures.
Which values do we want future technologies to embody? And what design and governance choices are available to support those values? Taking values seriously requires exploring the diversity of values valued across different social groups, and questioning how they can inform technological choices from the earliest stages of design. This is what a meaningful stakeholder engagement is supposed to do: its purpose should not simply be to gather opinions or validate predetermined technological trajectories, but to ensure diversity and a more equitable representation of interests, while also creating space to challenge the assumptions that underpin existing development pathways. Ultimately, the values that are recognised, represented and embedded in technological development will also influence the social impacts that technology produces.
Identifying relevant values is only one part of the challenge. Another is understanding how to capture them. This is the task that Key Value Indicators (KVIs) are called upon to address: identifying meaningful ways of assessing whether socially important values have been adequately considered and translated into technological development, as well as whether the resulting technologies generate positive outcomes in relation to those values. Many challenges remain open on this front, one of the most important being how to capture socially meaningful outcomes when these cannot be fully represented through numbers – resisting the temptation to measure only what is technically easy to measure, avoiding reducing KVIs to KPIs. Limitation in capturing social values would result in a biased representation of actual value created for society.
Another important dimension of our work is social acceptance. Technology acceptance is often understood and treated in terms of the probability that people will adopt or use a technology. This perspective– centred on ensuring business viability and market success – circumscribes acceptance to the context and sector of technology use, undermining the attention on potential rising ethical issues or on whether the technological futures being proposed is in line with what different groups in society consider important or prioritary.
Which interests are being promoted, and which may be neglected? In case there are misalignments between priorities and interests, social controversies arise. These have to be looked at as social signal, revealing situations in which the values, priorities or interests of particular social groups are perceived as being neglected, marginalised or insufficiently taken into account. Understanding these dynamics, therefore, is essential for understanding not only whether a technology will be adopted, but also whether its development trajectory is socially legitimate and desirable.
Social impacts are often discussed in the industrial context primarily in relation to the intended and expected benefits of a technological solution. A technology may, for example, be designed to improve access to healthcare, support more efficient energy systems or enable new forms of communication. Much less attention, however, is typically devoted to the broader, longer-term and unintended consequences that technologies may generate once they become embedded in society. Technologies can reshape behaviours, relationships, institutions, access to resources and opportunities in ways that extend far beyond their original purpose. Understanding their social impact therefore requires looking not only at what a technology is intended to do, but also at how it may transform society over time, including through indirect and unintended effects. Neglecting such effects may lead to misrepresenting the actual benefit generated by a certain technology.
Values, key value indicators, acceptance and social impact should are not separate issues. They emerge in technology design as deeply interconnected and mutually dependent. The way we define and understand one dimension influences how we approach the others.
A narrow understanding of acceptance, focused on the specific dimension of the quality of experience (QoE), may lead to a narrow or biased understanding of wider social needs, or of the interests at stake for specific social groups. The values that are implicitly prioritised during technology design (e.g. speed, connectivity, automation…) will determine what will automatically recognized (and measured) as a positive outcome, even if it expresses the vision and value of only a specific part of the population. If there is limited awareness as concerns the broader social impact that ICTs trigger in society, such considerations will not be considered at the R&I design nor in assessment procedures.
This brings us a to consideraions at another level: Sustainability. How can we suitably define and assess sustainability targets (we mean here principally social and environmental sustainability) if operating in a framework of narrow understanding of the social values possible impacted, of the interests possibly affected, and of the social impacts possibly induced?
The future of connectivity is not only about what technology will be capable of doing. It is also about what kind of future it will help to create, and whether that future is one that society recognises as valuable. Taking the social dimension of 6G seriously, therefore, deals with creating the conditions for social needs, values, priorities and potential consequences to become part, now, of the conversation about what technologies should be developed, for which purposes, and under which conditions.
More can be found in the websites of the projects:
Assessment of technology impact on privacy
Social acceptance of technologies assessment
Responsible Research & Innovation
