Tag: strategy

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.

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

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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.

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…

New article: Uncertainty, agency, and the future context of internet governance

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“Uncertainty, agency, and the future context of internet governance: a foresightful conversation” is an article I co-wrote for the Journal of Internet Technology and Politics with colleagues Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic, Sophie Mitchell, Zoe Hawkins, and Cho Khong.

We explore how the structures, dynamics, and value of internet governance may play out in different scenarios – and the implications for the situations and decisions we face today.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

Are we even talking about tomorrow? at UCL Languages of the Future

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I’m speaking at the UCL Languages of the Future conference on 6th June, presenting a paper titled “Are we even talking about tomorrow? Uncertainty, agency, and the encounter with the sublime”.

The event brings together contributors from across academia and broader society to think through the complex relationships between languages and times to come. We’ve been given a few big questions to chew on, like: How can “languages of the future” encapsulate specific individual disciplines, embrace diverse knowledge systems, convey the urgency of problems that are yet to arise, and honour the voices of the more-than-human world?

I’ll be standing on the shoulders of thinkers like UCL’s Richard Sandford to explore uncertainty, agency, and the “thick present”: an understanding of the here-and-now encompassing remembrance and anticipation. As Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson have it,

The future is always an aspect of the present. The future has not “taken place,” but the present always “holds” the future, and holds it as potential. Indeed, the future is never “later,” is it always (experienced, imagined) “now.”

Droplets hanging from a leaf in close up. The image is titled WHAT MIGHT TRANSPIRE? and includes a quotation from Sandford 2023: 'It is precisely action that makes the present thick. Pursuing the ends that we have demands that we weave together pasts, presents, and futures, producing the thick present through the exercise of our agency.'

Oxford Human-Algorithm Interaction Workshop 2025

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I’m pleased to be presenting at the University of Oxford’s Human-Algorithm Interaction Workshop 2025, on “Governing the futures you didn’t see coming: artificial intelligence scenarios“.

Do join us in Oxford, 5-8 July, for an interdisciplinary event delving into the complex and evolving relationship between humans and algorithms.

The annual workshop is a gathering of industry leaders, AI pioneers, and leading researchers who will explore the evolving role of AI in business, governance, and society. This year’s theme is “Shaping the future of AI: innovation, ethics and impact.”

Find out more and register here.