Potential vulnerabilities associated with emerging technologies: insights from a systematic literature review

Emerging technologies advance so rapidly that it is challenging to account for all of their positive and negative impacts. Discussion of vulnerabilities, the potential negative impacts, tends to be sidelined in favor of innovative transformations that such technologies have enabled in human lives. A holistic view of the impacts of emerging technologies is crucial for developers, policy makers, and technology users to improve design, evaluation, and policies to reduce threats and protect society. In this paper a systematic literature review has been conducted to identify various vulnerabilities that can be associated with emerging technologies, categorize the vulnerabilities, identify different types of each vulnerability and identify existing recommendations to mitigate them. Our analyses reveal that the potential vulnerabilities can be categorized into seven domains of technical, economical, health, ethical, legal/political, societal, and environmental vulnerabilities. In each category, vulnerabilities have been identified, examples and statistics of vulnerabilities have been explored, and protocols and suggested preventive actions have been identified. Our findings reveal that the most discussed categories of vulnerabilities are technical and ethical, and few protocols or preventative actions exist for reducing vulnerability in any of the categories. Considering both positive and negative impacts of emerging technologies is paramount in properly evaluating and regulating emerging technologies. This study sheds light in this direction by elaborating various vulnerabilities of emerging technologies.