Professor Hunter Heyck of the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine will be co-directing OU’s new Center for the Study of Emerging Technologies (CSET) with Mark Raymond (Political Science, OU). CSET advances the study of emerging technologies with an emphasis on understanding them in their full human context: historical, cultural, social, economic, political. For us, the ‘emerging’ phase for a given technology does not stop at commercialization and extends through the maturation of the technology in the built environment, meaning that we are interested in the adaptation of infrastructures and multi-generational systems to new technologies and new social and physical environments as well as in the emergence of technologies at the leading edge of innovation, such as AI, biotech, or quantum technologies.
