Some Problems in the Ethical Impact Assessment of Emerging Technologies and Socio-Technical Visions: Case CityVerse

This paper examines methodological challenges in the participatory ethical assessment of emerging technologies in urban contexts, using the CityVerse vision in Tampere, Finland as a case study. While metaverse technologies promise to transform smart cities by blending physical and virtual spaces, their ethical implications remain unclear. Through focus groups with city officials, we explored how participatory methods can effectively evaluate ethical dimensions of emerging technologies when they remain largely conceptual. Our findings reveal that while stakeholders can generate substantive ethical discourse, they struggle with the abstract nature of metaverse experiences, producing more questions than definitive answers. We argue that sociotechnical visions serve better as platforms for ethical discourse than as concrete implementation plans, functioning primarily to surface tacit values and assumptions. The study contributes to ethical technology assessment methodologies by suggesting that for emerging technologies, developing structured ontologies of questions may prove more valuable than premature answers. We conclude that CityVerse design should be approached as an ongoing discourse—not merely about technologies, but fundamentally about designing for improved quality of human life—where participatory ethical vision assessment functions as a form of collaborative conceptual engineering.