It is extremely important to be clear about what this involves. The reliance placed by lay actors upon expert systems is not just a matter—as was normally the case in the pre-modern world—of generating a sense of security about an independently given universe of events. It is a matter of the calculation of benefit and risk in circumstances where expert knowledge does not just provide that calculus but actually creates (or reproduces) the universe of events, as a result of the continual reflexive implementation of that very knowledge.

DEFINE: Clarifies the distinctive character of reflexive modernity: lay reliance on expert systems goes beyond reassurance about a pre-given world, instead constituting that world through the implementation of expert knowledge.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 203