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Short abstract:

This research explores the potential pitfalls and tensions behind the vision of sustainable aeromobilities through an ethnographic study of airport personnel and passengers in Santiago de Chile, raising the question: While the technology promises transformation, are we ready for its impact?

Long abstract:

The aerospace industry has envisioned a future of everyday aeromobilities powered by sustainable energy for the next 30 years. This vision rests on two pillars: the development of clean energy sources and Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems that will allow safe operation of a greater number of aircraft. However, this vision raises a crucial question: Is a future where aeromobilities reconfigures our way of life and the world we inhabit truly desirable?

To address this question, this paper presents an ethnographic study conducted at the Santiago de Chile International Airport. It focuses on the experiences and perspectives of the different actors involved in aeromobilities: pilots, crews, air traffic controllers, and passengers.

The study aims to understand how the industry's expectations align with the realities and needs of those who experience the system daily. It explores the tensions between efficiency and safety, flexibility and regulation, and environmental sustainability and user needs.

The research offers a critical perspective on the imaginary of post-decarbonization aeromobilities, considering the views of those who make it possible. It seeks to generate dialogue between the industry, system stakeholders, and society at large to build a more just, sustainable, and humane future for aeromobilities.

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Short abstract:

This paper reports the findings on a two-staged project that drew on speculative design fiction methods to explore the (co)creation of future digital technologies by children and industry professionals.

Long abstract:

This paper reports the findings on a two-staged project that drew on speculative design fiction methods (Dunne & Raby, 2013) to explore the (co)creation of future digital technologies by children and industry professionals. Stage 1 involved five 90-minute workshops with 42 children aged 4–10 years old, and Stage 2 saw two full-day workshops with 15 practitioners from media, tech, and game design backgrounds. The workshops with both children and practitioners followed a similar framework of playful activities. We first asked participants to draw as many ‘current digital technologies’ as they could think of, before proceeding to discuss what is a digital technology. We then had discussions about when the future is, before asking them to draw a future digital technology. For the children’s workshops, we playfully ‘transported’ them into the future (i.e., sometimes they wore ‘special hats’ and sometimes they stepped through a ‘portal’). And for the practitioner workshops, we ran a series of activities that presented the children’s reflections and drawings as inspiration to play with ‘unreality’ and speculate entirely new technologies. In both sets of workshops, we specifically asked participants to consider: what does this technology look like, what it is made of, when it will be available in the future, why do they want it, and why do they think others will like it. By analysing the drawings and reflections from both Stage 1 and 2, a key theme has emerged around the dichotomy between adult’s productization and children’s boundless interpretation, when speculating about future digital technologies.

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Short abstract:

Nowadays, decision-making relies on predicting future events. New algorithms offer predictions but their accuracy remains uncertain. This contribution explores how they shape future predictions amidst high uncertainty, focusing on socio-material affordances and onto-epistemological implications.

Long abstract:

In the era of poly-crises, effective decision-making is more and more relying on predicting and speculating about future events. In an increasingly complex world, societal actors require knowing as much as possible about the future, precisely they need information about possible futures without being able to determine the probability of these events occurring with accuracy. Predictive algorithms are increasingly being used as a tool of choice, as they promise not only to perform more objective analyses using complex computations and heterogeneous data sets. Furthermore, they have become producers of future predictions as well.

This contribution aims to change the perspective on future predictions in times of high uncertainty and when one can only make speculations about possible futures. Instead of focusing on (socio-technical) imaginaries and their performative effects, as most approaches do, this contribution focuses on the relationality and materiality of future predictions. This opens up the perspective of how predictions are produced and stabilized in and through socio-material arrangements and their affordances. Specifically, the transformation process of possible futures (speculations) into probable futures (predictions) will be traced to make uncertain futures actionable.

Drawing on empirical work on anticipatory action programs using predictive algorithms in the field of humanitarian crisis forecasting, this contribution (a) will analyze the socio-material interplay of actors and algorithms in the production and transformation process of actionable future knowledge, and (b) discuss the onto-epistemological status of the future in the face of new technologies like predictive algorithms.

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Short abstract:

In this paper, I argue that speculative knowledge plays multiple roles in anticipatory processes. Based on an analysis of future projects by Latin American Futurists, I characterize speculative modalities within anticipations. The relevance in why speculations matter as knowledge systems.

Long abstract:

Speculation is a form of knowledge increasingly relevant in STS and deeply connected to anticipatory processes and their governance (Alvial-Palavicino, 2016; Guston, 2014). The role of speculation in the creation of alternatives, the construction of scenarios, and the addressing of emerging challenges are central for future-makers and diverse leading roles in our current global crises. In this paper, I argue that speculative knowledge plays multiple roles in anticipatory processes. The diversity of these roles is key to understanding the place of speculative knowledge in future-making and its value as a knowledge system. (Pérez Comisso and Jeffrey, 2023)

Based on textual and socio-technical analysis of future-centered projects by Latin American Futurists, I characterize speculative modalities within anticipations. Speculative knowledge can manifest as extrapolations of current evidence, as small ways to divert from the present to situate a knowledge exchange, among other ways. All these modalities offer ways of knowing that aren´t easily predictable nor can be simulated without the co-productive labor of creatives, facilitators, and other knowledge workers. These ways of knowing are temporally oriented to produce visions of the future (Berkhout, 2006), yet the insights of speculative modalities can allow us to appreciate and recognize key elements of speculative knowledge in everyday life that aren´t categorized, systemized, or programmed (yet), to revalue the labor involved this kind of knowledge-work, that resist boundary-work beyond time and space.

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Short abstract:

Present debates on speculation raise recurring questions about the distinctions between divination, statistics, computation, and AI. From the ancient to the contemporary, this paper reveals original historical insight on the socio-cultural functions of speculation and its hegemonic entanglements.

Long abstract:

Present debates about the nature of artificial intelligence (AI) and its capacity as a technology of speculation (Natale, 2021; Pasquinelli, 2023) point to longer traditions of producing predictions through data aggregation, algorithmic calculation, and pattern recognition—highlighting recurring questions about epistemological and ideological distinctions between speculative practices like divination, statistics, computation, and artificial intelligence (Benqué, 2021; Lazaro, 2018).

From the ancient to the contemporary, societies have sought to foresee the future to mitigate uncertainty, circumvent crises, and engineer favourable scenarios (Andersson, 2018; Daston, 1995). Techniques for speculation, accessible even today largely only to those in positions of power, have been in use long before the advent of AI: occult prophesy, astrology, weather forecasting, demography, epidemiology, financial markets, and strategic foresight.

Conceptually situating AI amongst these techniques, I engage with a media archaeological approach (Parikka, 2012) that rejects linear and teleological historiographies. Using archival methods, historical analysis, and critical discourse analysis, I analyse the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, Islamic Golden Age astrolabes, seventeenth-century Pascal’s calculator, the mid-twentieth-century ENIAC computer, and Chat GPT to determine how these technologies of speculation have and continue to shape one another across shifting societal contexts.

This investigation reveals original historical perspectives on the socio-cultural function of prediction-making and insights about the deep-rooted entanglements of speculation with sites of hegemonic contention. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how the lines between pseudo-science and science, magical thinking and secular rationality, and divination and speculation have consistently been redrawn in efforts by ruling classes to maintain political and economic control over populations.