Author: Mechanical Dolphin

Surveying the (Criminal) Future: A Virtual Roundtable on Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report

Mechanical Dolphin

On Thursday 30th April, I’ll join an interdisciplinary panel of researchers for an online discussion, organised by Surveillance & Society, about Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report.

The movie is a dystopian thriller released early in the post-9/11 eraa, set in a world where the US government is beginning to use technologies to survey the future and stop crimes before they occur. The film follows a cop (Tom Cruise) who becomes targeted by the very systems he deploys to catch others before they act.

This early digital blockbuster captures a historic moment where safety and surveillance were often inextricably linked, while speaking to a future era defined by algorithmic surveillance, where our behaviors are swayed and dictated by mechanisms beyond our sight and often beyond our control.

My fellow panellists include University of Oslo media and communications researcher Professor Steffen Krueger; Associate Professor Kellie Marin of Texas State University, who specialises in research on civic participation within the surveillance state; and Malka Older, the writer, aid worker, and sociologist, who teaches on predictive fictions at Arizona State University. Our host and moderator is Texas Tech Associate Professor Fareed Ben-Youssef, who writes on the intersections between surveillance studies and popular cinema.

This interdisciplinary roundtable will consider how the competing visions of the future staged by the film echo contemporary concerns about prediction, control, and resistance in a networked world.

Sign up for the webinar via the Zoom event page for “Surveying the (Criminal) Future” .

Exhibition: Ecotones: States of Proximity

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m pleased to have written the accompanying notes for the upcoming exhibition Ecotones: States of Proximity, by the glass artist María Renée Morales Lam.

María Renée Morales Lam’s work has long concerned itself with unseen forces and past dynamics that make themselves visible and palpable in moments of encounter and contact. The concept of the ecotone, which lends its name to this exhibition, describes regions of transition between ecological communities – including tidal areas, estuaries, and the riparian zones which mark the edges of rivers, streams, and lakes against the land. In each of these places, materials – and life itself – may flow and exchange in valuable ways.

Here, we are invited to the meeting point of the everyday world and an artspace in which Morales Lam’s principal medium, glass, toys with our perceptions of materiality and our understanding of the properties of light.

See more at Lisbon’s Duplex Gallery from 24 April.

Humanities @ Oxford: Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI

Mechanical Dolphin

Alongside my other duties, I’m pleased to take on a new role leading the project “Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI” at Oxford University – a collaboration between the Uehiro Oxford Institute and TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

The prehistoric Newgrange mound, one of the world’s oldest extant funerary monuments, by Flickr user Ron Cogswell – CC BY 2.0

Emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence create the possibility of new relationships between the living and the dead.

After physical decease, what digital entities might live on in our stead? What agency will they have? How will the underlying technologies be developed, deployed, and managed? How will identity be authenticated?

What will be the impact on how individuals, families, communities, and societies approach the end of life, its associated rituals, and the ways in which we remember those who are gone?

Our team will use scenario planning to explore these questions and more, envisaging different future contexts for the relationship between AI and the afterlife, encompassing all aspects of memorial culture, funerary practices, and posthumous existence in the digital world.

Learn more at the TORCH website.

Interview in new Ludic Narrans books: Oral history of play

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m one of many interviewees in the two new Ludic Narrans books by Play Story Press, a “playful oral history” of fields including gaming, mixed reality, immersive theatre, sports, interactive roleplay and more – bringing together a vast amount of research into different forms of play by Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University.

“Not Another KM Podcast” with Brittany Persinger and Rachel Teague

Mechanical Dolphin

I made a guest appearance on the latest episode of “Not Another KM Podcast”, hosted by Brittany Persinger and Rachel Teague, to talk about scenario planning, foresight, and knowledge management.

You can find the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you get podcasts.

Wise Enough for an Uncertain World: Scenarios, Metrics, and Social Impact 

Mechanical Dolphin

My latest piece of writing, “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World: Scenario Planning and Social Impact“, can be found at the Danish social impact nonprofit Impact Insider.

It’s an exploration of how we make a measurable difference to social issues in an unpredictable world, drawing on research with the University of Oslo, the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the IMAJINE project, and Peat Hub Ireland.

If social impact means creating long-term change, then we face a difficult problem: we live in turbulent times, and the future in which our impact will unfold is deeply uncertain.

Scenario planning can help by developing multiple plausible and contrasting futures, relevant to current concerns but challenging to our assumptions. Building and using scenarios offers the opportunity to critically explore expectations, hopes, and fears about the world within which we hope to make an impact.

Photo by Raul Kozenevski on Pexels.com

Scenarios can inform the design of impact metrics which embody deeper values by considering the question: What might future generations wish we had measured in hindsight?

As we consider what inhabitants of different future scenarios might value, we can then identify and design appropriate impact measures to implement today. 

Read “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World” at Impact Insider.

Oxford Answers: Navigating the future of the networked world

Mechanical Dolphin

At Oxford Answers, the blog of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, Sophie Mitchell and I have a new post about the auDA scenarios built by Australia’s domain name registrar auDA.

“If global governance comprises not just formal institutions and regulations but the ‘mood music’ of the world, what part do we all have to play in shaping that mood today and taking responsibility for the future which transpires? Will leaders take collective action and contribute to digital civil society? Will digital platforms embrace a duty of care towards the most vulnerable users? Or will competitive opportunity be sought in the cracks, if tectonic shifts occur in the management of the global internet?”

Read more at Oxford Answers.

Celebrating five years of “Laboratorios Ciudadanos” with Spanish Ministry of Culture

Mechanical Dolphin

The course “Cómo montar un laboratorio ciudadano en bibliotecas y otras instituciones culturales” (How to set up a citizen laboratory in libraries and other cultural institutions), run by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary with a special publication, “Bibliotecas y participación ciudadana” (Libraries and citizen participation), which is now free to download in PDF format.

It has been my pleasure to contribute to the course as a tutor since its inception, and to make a small contribution to the celebratory volume, which offers a range of practical tools for those who might want to set up their own “citizen laboratory”, working with communities and institutions to experiment and innovate on social and cultural issues.

You can find “Bibliotecas y participación ciudadana” here.

Navigating the sea of uncertainty: Global Youth Climate Summit Recording

Mechanical Dolphin

One of my contributions to the 2025 Global Youth Climate Summit, hosted by the University of Oxford, has just gone online at the Oxford Climate Change Challenge site.

In the newly-released talk “Navigating the sea of uncertainty: challenging assumptions about what the future holds“, we consider ways to address times of turbulence, when the context in which we operate seems to be unsteady and unpredictable.

You can also see a previously released talk from the same event, “The black box of action: how to make your climate project count“, at the same site.