The Value of Socio-Technical Futures: Anticipation and Relational Quality

• In Event: Innovating, Interrupting & Regenerating the Human-Technology Frontier - III

Abstract

Anticipation is commonly understood as an activity highly related to “the future.” Anticipation implies considering plausible future scenarios in order to improve understanding of the human condition and promote a more robust decision-making in the present (Konrad et al. 2018). Some scholars understand future scenarios as the basic performative and heuristic core of anticipations. However, the focus on scenarios has promoted the emergence of some critics (e.g., it is not clear whether the mere presentation of future narratives can develop anticipatory abilities) and misunderstandings (e.g., assessing scenarios robustness in terms of its relationship to the future).

This paper argues that although anticipation is a valuable practice for the governance of sociotechnical systems, the heuristics of this activity does not come from its products (i.e., the representations about the future per se). Rather, anticipatory knowledge emerges as the result of a process involving the co-creation of future scenarios and the negotiation of the plausibility of those scenarios (Selin 2011). Specifically, we claim that the heuristic force of anticipation depends on the socio-epistemic robustness of that process, which lies on the relational quality of the interactions underlying the production of alternative futures.

References

Konrad, K. E. et al. (2016). Performing and Governing the Future in Science and Technology. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (pp. 465–493). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Selin, C. (2011). Negotiating plausibility: intervening in the future of nanotechnology. Science and Engineering Ethics, 17(4): 723–737.

Authors

• Sergio Urueña, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

• Hannot Rodríguez, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

• Andoni Ibarra, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU