Paper Short Abstract:

How will healthcare AI reshape the future of medicine? This paper dives into AI-driven healthcare exploring AI-human collaborations through imagined figures like Algorithmic Alchemists and Data Healers. Blending speculation with anthropology may spark new ways of storytelling and worldmaking.

Paper Abstract:

The field of healthcare AI looms large with projections of future capabilities. AI is popularly thought of as possibly revolutionizing healthcare. As prominent, American physician Eric Topol writes, “AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment.” At present, AI technologies assist doctors in identifying potential cancer in mammography scans, predicting risk of sepsis for hospitalized patients, and stratifying psychiatric patients as “focus patients” according to their risk of physical restraint. Amidst the hype and hope, the fear and foreboding, how do medical physicians grapple with the unpredictable promises and perils of AI futures? How do these professional predictors of illness project their professional futures? Taking a cue from conversations with medical professionals and medical AI researchers in Danish hospital settings, I delve into the speculative futures of a healthcare system increasingly shaped by AI. Using an approach inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of Speculative Fabulation, I aim to reimagine the future of AI through key figures that I tentatively call “Algorithmic Alchemists” and “Data Healers”. Through these figures questions of AI-human forms of collaboration, knowledge, and responsibility may be elaborated in situated stories. By embracing speculative fabulation, I seek to tell stories untold and explore other kinds of worldmaking. Through these narratives, I will examine the anthropological implications of embracing speculation as an analytic and how the juxtaposition of anthropological figures with the futures of healthcare AI may contribute to understandings of predictive practices.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the generative role of prediction in the new phase of digital state-making currently underway in India and speculate into the future of anthropological knowledge in tandem with the thinking on the new state-form that is born from within blackbox logic.

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In this paper I take up the invitation of this panel to examine the generative role of prediction in the new phase of digital state-making currently underway in India. The Indian state's new governance infrastructure relies on speculative investments into future citizenship through predictive behaviour generated through algorithmic control extending into several aspects of economic, social, and political life. his new digital state, I argue, is not a technological improvement or add-on but a new state form that emerges out of and creates new settlements, including those between the state and its citizens.

Anthropology has undoubtedly moved past the difficulties once imagined in studying the state. This paper will revisit some of the past difficulties as well as their transcendence in light of this new state form. Chief among is the tension between the production of regularities as a primary form of state violence (pace James Scott) and the production of new forms of unruliness in and through ever-proliferating datasets and blackbox algorithms. Anthropological knowledge played a crucial role in assisting the state with optics and in turn was made through its entanglement with state-making projects. This paper will speculate into the future of anthropological knowledge in tandem with the thinking on the new state-form that is born from within blackbox logic.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper is a speculative exploration through revisiting ethnographic material from interviews with cryptocurrency traders in Turkey, juxtaposing the participants’ and the ethnographer’s divergent visions of the future.

Paper Abstract:

This paper offers a speculative exploration through revisiting ethnographic material from interviews with cryptocurrency traders in Turkey that explored engaging with the future through questions of “what if?!”. It juxtaposes the participants’ and the ethnographer’s divergent visions of the future, shaped by the instability of the Turkish economy and the volatility of cryptocurrency markets. In passionate discussions predicting the future of the state, the economic crisis, and the evolution of money, the participants in this paper reveal how speculation, gambling, and financial foresight intertwine with their socio-economic realities. As the ethnographer, I also forecast, envisioning futures shaped by the participants’ lived experiences. The participants’ speculative trajectories point to a dual outcome: one of empowerment through financial gains in cryptocurrency markets, creating a class of decentralized entrepreneurs, and another of disillusionment, where the state’s regulatory measures and market volatility erode trust in both the state and decentralized systems. Similarly, I foresee that their collective practices might catalyze broader societal shifts, redefining wealth and economic security within Turkey’s uncertain economic landscape. By reflecting on these speculative dialogues, this paper questions how prediction, both method and subject, can reshape anthropological inquiry and knowledge production.

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This paper explores cash stuffing, a practice emerging in online retail investor circles where cash is aesthetically earmarked to fix futures. Speculating with these micro-predictions challenges linear financial models and highlights embodiment.

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What can we learn when we contextualize practices not just in what past and present they reference but also what future they offer to bring about? I set out to play with this question drawing on an example encountered during my PhD fieldwork, when I worked with retail investors and ‘Finfluencer’ communities on Instagram. A practice emerged in 2023 – cash stuffing.

Unlike yield curves, cash stuffing does not seek to predict the future but to fix it by ‘earmarking’ (Zelizer 1994) cash in envelopes for specific uses. The concern for a visually pleasing, ultimately transient, present – the cash stuffed envelopes are made to be emptied – is tied to the tangible and embodied experience of a highly financialized system. Thinking ahead; a growing popularity of cash stuffing in the face of increasing economic precarity symbolizes a retreat into individually manageable aesthetics that seek (futilely) to regain control by making distant futures immediate. This reveals an intersection of money and finance, at which these aesthetics are essential. Speculating with cash stuffing can allow anthropologists to utilize these everyday micro-predictions to discuss a non-linear time that does not fit common patterns of prediction, right within Western capitalism.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on 2 years of fieldwork in a Japanese robotics laboratory, I analyse the recent 'predictive turn' in robotics, AI and neuroscience. In so doing, I unearth the vernacular specifications of surprise and futurity stemming from it, and speculate upon how these visions reshape humanity.

Paper Abstract:

This paper draws from 2 years of fieldwork in a Japanese robotics laboratory, and focuses on the specific sets of theories and experiments emerging at the conjunction between AI, robotics and neuroscience, attempting to explain, model, and ultimately reproduce living processes.

Particularly, such endeavours focus on modelling life as a struggle to minimise one's 'surprise' in regards to environmental stimuli, optimising one's effort by learning to predict the structures of the world in increasingly accurate terms.

Starting from these premises of life as a predictive machine, I first explore what such a conceptualisation does to our understanding of the (all too human) experiences of gaining information, and being surprised. Further, I analyse a specific experiment carried out in the laboratory which operationalises such an understanding. I highlight how such a vernacular re-framing might be radically different from anthropological modes of thinking about futurity, rather showcasing what happens when prediction becomes a tool to control information and surprise. Lastly, I report a thought experiment emerged in conversation with my informants: what would happen when a robot is simply unable to be surprised anymore?

Starting from such impossible speculations which stretch the conceptual limits of these theories, I trace the different ways in which we can think about prediction, the predictive capacities of living beings, and the opportunities afforded by a predictive anthropology. In doing so, I draw on Derrida's idea of 'absolute surprise' to retrace the contours of a mode of predicting that creates ever-so-new potentials, rather than drying up possibilities.

Paper Short Abstract:

Anthropology took shape as a discipline via travelogues and expedition reports in English, French and German. But what if its foundational texts had been written in Esperanto or Portuguese? This paper proposes speculating about the past as a method to reimagine anthropology’s (im)possible futures.

Paper Abstract:

In 1931, Joseph Scherer (1901-1967) embarked on a world tour, travelling from California to Japan, then to China and several countries in Asia and Europe. Once back in the US, Scherer gave talks across the country and published an ethnographic-like book analysing the meticulous notes he kept about the societies and cultures he encountered. Interestingly, all his communication while abroad, as well as his book and talks, were in Esperanto.

From Scherer’s extensive travels to Tibor Sekelj’s (1912-1988) books on his expeditions to Nepal, India and Latin America, as well as Vasili Eroshenko’s (1890-1952) accounts on Siam and Burma, Esperanto speakers are notorious for their globetrotting and travel-writing. In many ways, Joseph Scherer’s travelogues preceded yet resemble Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’, exhibiting a quasi-scientific pretension of preserving the world’s cultural diversity through comprehensive documentation. In writing cultures, these Esperanto speakers also sought to predict what the future could look like if people shared a common language and could communicate freely across borders.

Speculating from Esperanto speakers’ speculations, this paper asks: what if anthropology had been shaped by ethnographic-like accounts written in languages other than English and French, such as Joseph Scherer’s travelogues in Esperanto or Carolina Maria de Jesus’ memoirs of Brazil’s urban working classes in Portuguese? I argue that (1) speculation and prediction are not solely about envisioning the future but also involve reimagining alternative pasts, and (2) speculation can give us a glimpse of what other languages and approaches to storytelling can contribute to anthropological theory and practice.

Paper Short Abstract:

The UK ratified the Paris agreement in 2016 and agreed to substantially decarbonise. However, in this presentation I draw on fieldwork conducted both with a local government in the North-East of England and post-coalonial communities to suggest that a post-carbon future is likely unattainable.

Paper Abstract:

County Durham is one of England's larger local government areas. The extraction of fossil fuel from the county's subterranean forest played an integral role not just in the area’s economy, but in Britain's projection of power for more than a century. Yet, there are no longer any extant coal mines in Durham, deep or otherwise. Furthermore, Durham County Council declared a climate emergency in 2019 and committed to substantially decarbonising the council by 2030 and decarbonising the entire county by 2050. It charged its Low Carbon Economy team with being both the mother and the midwife of its plan to decarbonise the County Durham.

While the team is composed of exceedingly competent individuals, I suggest that they are unlikely to attain this second goal and that furthermore achieving a post-carbon future for Durham is distinctly unlikely. I base my prediction upon participant observation and semi-structured interviews that I conducted with the team, and the wider council, between 2020 and 2021, and participant observation and interviews that I conducted with the inhabitants of a couple of Durham mining communities between 2022 and 2023.

The team's failure to achieve a post-carbon County Durham will I suggest result from a myriad factors including lack of public engagement, the fickleness of central government, and a focus on resolving matters through techno-fixes and solutionism.

Paper Short Abstract:

I show how the notion of ‘control’ affects the ideas of change held by amateur cricketers in Sri Lanka. Though modernist discourses of cricket maintain the status quo, the nature of repetition and invention within cricket indicates a route towards an anthropology centred on prognosis.

Paper Abstract:

Understanding cricketers’ concepts of change is important in Sri Lanka, where the sport has been promoted as a reconciliatory tool post- civil-war. Engrained modernist discourses present sport as a force for change, enabling individual development and promoting group unity. Intrinsically, each sporting encounter carries potential for moments of repetition and invention, yet the modernist discourses discourage invention. Sri Lankan cricketers are still taught to exercise ‘control’. Movement drills, self-discipline, and risk aversion bring success, while minimising individuality limits threats to team unity. Hence, understandings of change are individually centred, with cricketers working to ensure continuity within the group. While my interlocutors thought cultivating ‘control’ made them better people, they learned how to navigate their social constraints, rather than challenge them. Cricket in its current form is hegemonic: it does not encourage cricketers to confront the status quo, and therefore cannot promote reconciliation in the future.

While cricket’s modernist form limits social change, exploring the intrinsic tension between repetition and invention could illuminate a method for anthropological prediction. If sporting action oscillates between repetition and invention, change is constant, iterative, and moves slowly. Because traditionally cricketers also exercise control – limiting their invention – then trajectories of change could be traced from past into the future, at least in the short term. For this anthropologists must follow Yael Navaro’s ‘negative’ approach (2020), working backwards to delimit the bounds of these trajectories. Rather than attempting discrete, disputable predictions, an anthropology grounded in prognosis would establish a delimited range of probable futures.

Paper Short Abstract:

Can ethnography parse traces of infrastructural futures to come? This paper draws on an ethnography of community energy in the UK to prefigure one possible future of energy and to reflect on the implications of its articulation.

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In this paper we speculate, along with community energy practitioners in the UK, on what the future of energy could look like in 2030. Building on a prospectus for an energy company of the future that one of the authors helped put together in 2018, we explore how we might discern signals of the future from our present research on people, energy and infrastructure. Paying attention not only to technical systems but to the relational promises that carry emergent technical forms forward, we propose an energy future where a newly electrified and decentralised person emerges as the proto energy citizen of an increasingly renewable-driven system. As people are refigured as conduits for newly electrified relations, we find them drawn into socio-material arrangements in which they have to grapple with questions of distribution, equity, and material instability. Domestic routines are forced to confront both earthly dynamics of weather and climate, and an electric body politic made up not only of people but of a distributed array of energetic objects – cars, houses, batteries. Will this come true? With what effects? And what might be the implications of writing this future down for ushering it into being or warding it off?

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on how young “mestizos” (mixed, nonindigenous) in urban Peruvian Amazonia are reclaiming their Indigenous ancestry as a source of cultural and symbolic value, I speculate on how this shift could reshape future Latin American –and global– legal frameworks surrounding Indigenous rights.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines ongoing changes in Amazonian identity politics, focusing on young men and women in urban Peruvian Amazonia who ethnically identify as “mestizo” (mixed, nonindigenous). Key literature shows how, historically, identity politics in Latin America have been dominated by the colonial ideology of “mejorar la raza” (improving the race); a principle distinct from the North American “one-drop rule”. Yet, in contrast to past tendencies to downplay Indigenous heritage, many young mestizos today view their “Indigenous blood” as a source of cultural and symbolic value, countering the ethnic homogenization trends of their parents' generation. Some young mestizos are “re-indigenising” their ethnic status by drawing on remote Indigenous ancestry: in emic terms, a single symbolic “drop” of Indigenous blood is increasingly valued as a marker of identity, granting access to sociocultural capital as well as legal and financial benefits.

Building on these findings, I speculate on how this could affect future legal frameworks tied to self-identification policies underpinning Indigenous rights. I imagine a future where mestizos might claim the benefits of self-determination while maintaining the advantages of their hybridity. This paper invites reflection on how anthropology might engage with such evolving identity practices, imagining how they might reshape future understandings of ethnicity –in Latin America and beyond.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper imagines a future in which the apocalyptic prophecies of a group of anti-COVID-19 vaccine individuals come true and uses this dystopian scenario to critically reflect on the present it embodies and the cultural anxieties it reveals.

Paper Abstract:

Conspiracy theories are cultural phenomena that interpret events and social conditions as the result of hidden, malevolent forces. They often challenge mainstream narratives. Rooted in imaginative connections and causal constructions, conspiracy theories project dystopian and apocalyptic futures. Far from being passive consumers, conspiracy theorists often embody these visions, reshaping their lifestyles to fit alternative worldviews.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork within an anti-COVID-19 vaccine movement in Italy, this paper explores the apocalyptic imaginaries of its participants and speculates on what might happen if their prophecies were to be realised. By imagining a dystopian future shaped by these beliefs, the study reflects on how such projections illuminate anxieties about power, control and societal collapse in the present. Through an imaginative yet critical engagement with these narratives - despite their political implications and ethnocentric biases - the study seeks to illuminate the cultural anxieties, emotional investments and societal tensions that underpin conspiracy theories in contemporary contexts.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on turning hopes into predictions, focusing on Tanzanian medical technology and ambitions of achieving technological sovereignty. It examines the value, processes, and outcomes of broadening predictive practices in social science

Paper Abstract:

In their recent volume, Knight and Bryant explore ways in which people orient themselves to the future, ranging from hope to anticipation to expectation. Curiously missing from their list, however, is one of the most influential: prediction. Perhaps this omission isn’t so curious. Prediction is associated with positivist epistemologies, which have been out of vogue in anthropology for some time. Contemporary anthropology has preferred to describe and interpret rather than to explain and predict.

This paper reflects on my ethnographic research on data-driven medical technologies in Tanzania and Tanzanians' own ambitions for technological sovereignty. I explore what it would take to transition both my own and my interlocutors' hopes, anticipations, and expectations into predictions. In other words, to turn a tentative orientation to the future into a more certain and committed one. Moreover, I ask why I might choose to do this, given the often spectacular failures of prediction, and what fate I predict for my own predictions. I draw from a recent interest in wresting the practice of explanation away from positivist epistemologies by broadening what it means to give an explanation. In short, I ask whether it is helpful to broaden and diversify what it means to predict.