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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and roboticists, we develop the concept of 'speculative modelling’ to rethink speculation as both central to technoscience and as an open practice, beyond the ‘closed’ nature of prediction.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we develop the concept of 'speculative modelling’ to understand encounters between practices of predictive modelling and the human modellers who tinker with them. While speculation typically denotes conjecture in a negative sense, we draw on feminist STS literature on speculative fiction to rethink speculation as both central to technoscience and as an open practice, beyond the ‘closed’ nature of prediction. Our contribution speaks to the panel’s concern with models as technologies of future-making by showing how speculative practices uneasily and unsteadily persist within, and potentially disrupt, the automation and ‘generativity’ of contemporary predictive systems, notwithstanding the push to erode such speculations.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and roboticists, we highlight how human modellers necessarily engage in speculative practices: from aiming to build models that ‘surprise’ their makers through their lack of predictability; simultaneously collapsing and expanding the difference between model and modelled; and recognising the limits of models by acknowledging modellers’ role in the emergence of models themselves. While scientists and engineers often acknowledge such speculative practices, they present them as preliminary to their scientific process, or as glitches to be patched over through ‘better’, 'more efficient', 'mathematically sturdy’ implementations.

Conversely, we focus on what speculation might mean for a critique of predictive and generative modelling. In framing speculation as a counterbalance to the ‘closed’ nature of prediction, we wish to re-open the multiple, alternative futures that lie in the space between models, their subjects, objects, makers, and interlocutors.