By Professor Dawn Lyon, University of Kent

 

It’s August 2020 and a young woman who is mother to a five-year-old boy is grappling with the relationship between the present and the future.

In an account to Mass Observation, she writes:

The uncertainty and not knowing how long the wait for ‘normality’ will be is the hardest part of this for me. It’s difficult to look forward to things in the future because we have no way of knowing whether they’ll happen. […] Usually I see August bank holiday as a real checkpoint in the year; summer is all but over and I’d be looking forward to my favourite bit of the year, especially now I have a child. I love going out trick or treating with my son on Hallowe’en. Bonfire night has always been a favourite of mine and although I find Christmas stressful, I do enjoy the run up – that festive feeling, the food, the time off. But this year, who knows which bits of Autumn will happen.

The rupture of the pandemic prompts this writer to articulate her ordinary, repetitive ways of marking time. The social rhythms of the year – Hallowe’en and Bonfire night – offer anchor points and are part and parcel of the everyday present. (more…)

By Lisa May Thomas and Debbie Watson 

Everyday vast amounts of data are being collected, analysed and used to train AI on a scale we have never experienced before. Right now, decisions are being made by big businesses and government that will determine how and by whom this data can be used.  

But this data impacts all of us, we need to make these decisions together. 

These are decisions about what data gets collected; decisions about how we are grouped and compared, about how data is processed and used to teach AI systems to analyse and predict our behaviour. To make assumptions about us. 

Data driven systems now underpin our lives. it’s not just about us as individuals. It’s not in the cloud. Data is everywhere. Data is collective. Data is powerful. 

So are we. 

We need to decide together how this data about all of us should be used, now and in the future.  

We are all connected by data. 

https://connectedbydata.org/  (more…)

Futures: Up Late 2024, was a coming together of the Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), MyWorld and the Bristol Vision Institute (BVI) on the SS Great Britain. We demonstrated at the event lots of different types of technologies to stimulate an open conversation about the future use of them, from Virtual Reality to real-time emotion detection technology. With this latter technology Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer vision can be used to not only identify faces but claims to read your emotions too. But how reliable is it? And what ethical issues arise when AI is used to detect our feelings?

(more…)

By CenSoF’s Moving Domain Team and Nicholas Ward, Funding and Partnership Development Executive, Port of Dover

In October 2024 the European Union (EU) plans to implement its Entry/Exit System (EES). The world’s richest countries are moving away from physical passports and visas, and towards a fully digital record of immigration status and history. EES is part of this strategy but, without an upstream technological solution, challenges have been raised as to how this will be carried out in practice by the EU in a way that does not impede the vital flow of people and goods on Kent’s motorways? And how is the Port managing the traffic already flowing into Dover? (more…)

By Priscila Gonsales

One of the challenges for those who research education based on the perspective of post-humanism is to disseminate the idea that digital technology, increasingly embedded in social life, cannot be deemed a mere tool-object to be appropriated by the human being-subject. Katherine Hayles’ post-humanist perspective focuses on the interactions between human beings and technologies (between body and information). These make it possible to understand tangled networks in constant construction and reconstruction in the sociodigital context. (more…)

By Lisa May Thomas

It’s a cold day in February and we’re here on the banks of the river Avon in Bristol thinking about all the different ways it’s possible to know a river.

With us is a group of interdisciplinary academics, artists, environmental professionals and community organisations. We’ve come together through a project exploring river futures. Over the next few hours we’ll be experimenting with different methods to understand the river in new ways.

(more…)

By Ash Watson

How we imagine the future has impacts on our everyday lives and societies. To research these impacts, we need to grapple with speculation, uncertainty and multiple possibilities. How can we study people’s imaginations and the effects of things that haven’t happened yet? One avenue involves taking seriously speculative fiction. (more…)