Making conjectures about future consequences of a technology is an exercise in trying to reduce various forms of uncertainty. Both to produce and reason about these conjectures requires understanding their potential limitations. In other words, we need systematic ways of considering uncertainty associated with given conjectures for downstream consequences. In this work, we frame the task of considering future consequences as an anticipatory ethics problem, where the goal is to develop scenarios that reflect plausible outcomes and their ethical implications following a technology's introduction into society. In order to shed light on how various forms of uncertainty might inform how we reason about a resulting scenario, we provide a characterization of the types of uncertainty that arise in a potential scenario-building process.

翻译：关于技术未来后果的推测是试图减少各种形式不确定性的一种做法。为了提出和解释这些假设的理由,都需要了解其潜在的局限性。换句话说,我们需要系统的方法来考虑与下游后果的预测相关的不确定性。在这项工作中,我们把考虑未来后果的任务设定为预先预测的道德问题,其目标是在将技术引入社会之后,提出反映合理结果及其伦理影响的假想。为了说明各种不确定形式如何说明我们如何解释由此产生的假想,我们对潜在假想建立过程中出现的不确定性类型作了描述。