Tag: scenarios

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

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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” .

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

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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.

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

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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 

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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

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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.

Navigating the sea of uncertainty: Global Youth Climate Summit Recording

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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.

Entering a new year with a single question

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From time to time, as one year draws to a close and another approaches, I share some tool or tip that may be useful: the “arrows of time“, value-creating systems, a wider reflection on scenarios as “stories of the future you didn’t see coming“.

This year, I offer just a single question.

Ask yourself: “How will this moment be remembered?”

It seems innocuous, but an honest answer will force you to be brave in confronting your assumptions and beliefs.

Shiretoko-Shari Tourist Association

It stems from work of mine which was cited in Betty Sue Flowers’ new book, Scenarios: Crafting and using stories of the future to change the present.

There, I wrote that mature foresight work

enables people not to say, “Which future do I think I want, from the limits of my perception and understanding today”, but instead to ask “How would people in each different future judge the decision which I currently think to be so wise?”

This is the true benefit of manufactured hindsight: a kind of epistemic humility in the face of uncertainty, where instead of presuming we know what’s best for times which haven’t arrived yet, we enter into dialogue with potential futures and see beyond the received wisdom which may limit as well as reassure us.

If we simply ask ourselves, as we head into a new year, how this moment will be remembered, it tells us something about our understanding of the here-and-now – but also our beliefs about the future which is ahead of us.

The answers we come up with provide us with assumptions to explore, test, and challenge. What if a different future awaits, perhaps one that will judge us by different values and standards to those we hold today? What if hindsight will teach us a lesson we hadn’t yet imagined?

By exploring this question and different potential answers, we can reach for wisdom, rather than simply pointing at the future we think we want, on the basis of where we stand in the uncertain present.

Peat Hub Ireland Report including Peatlands 2050 scenarios

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“What I liked most about the workshop was getting to experience a framework for discourse between different stakeholders where everyone was approaching challenging ideas with an amount of vulnerability and openness. Things like the icebreaker question and being pushed outside of our cognitive comfort zones led to a kind of shared sense of uncertainty and unease that made it much easier for conversation and creativity to happen.”

Words from a participant at the scenarios workshop I led as part of the Peat Hub Ireland initiative, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and delivered by UCD colleagues under the leadership of Florence Renou-Wilson, including David Wilson, Kate Flood, and Elena Aitova.

You can see the full report, including an appendix on the scenarios, at the EPA website. Thanks to all the colleagues and to the host of our scenario session at Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath – it’s a rare delight to run a scenario workshop with a ninety minute bog walk in the middle of it…

Ministry of Time Book Review for Vector

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“In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters.”

I write on Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful novel The Ministry of Time for the British Science Fiction Association’s journal Vector, and consider the book’s wider implications for public imagination in a turbulent era.

“Time travel in science fiction has, itself, a history and prehistory, a present, and presumably a future. It has the potential for new and emergent ideas of temporality – scientific, poetic, popular, expert – to succeed those currently held by researchers, philosophers, artists, authors, critics, and the general public of the day…Perhaps Bradley’s novel will also, in times to come, show itself to be one of the works that opened the door onto a new era of popular time travel fiction. This new era is one which, however fraught, creates new opportunities for us to face up to the uncertainties around us.”

Read “Eternally Displaced Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time” in Vector online, here.