We are delighted Bristol Digital Futures Institute is our 2021 Bronze Partner.
Professor Susan Halford, Co-Director of Bristol Digital Futures Institute, and our 2021 Academic Keynote, briefly summarises her talk and explains BDFI’s work.
We need to talk about the future
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, bold claims are being made about how new technologies will shape our world. Most recently, Artificial Intelligence has been heralded as the generic technological shift that will solve previously intractable problems — from climate change to global inequality — or, alternatively, that will lead to catastrophe. The emerging reality will be somewhere in between, or may be something else altogether. How this will emerge is far from inevitable.
Previous research has established that deterministic claims about what technologies will (or won’t) do, and linear predictions about their impact, are inadequate. There is no ‘future’ but rather multiple potential futures, and these will emerge in complex ways with social and digital changes happening with and alongside one another.
Our question then is: what part can we play in making futures?
We are not recipients of ‘the future’ but protagonists in opening-up some futures and closing-down others (Stirling 2008). We have a responsibility to the unknown outcomes of our innovations and actions. Our task is to become response-able (c.f. Haraway 2016) for these futures in the making. In the digital age, this means not only thinking about human futures in the context of rapidly changing technology but technology futures in the context of complex, unequal and fragile society.
We should think collectively…
Across the social and computational sciences, with partners in industry, government and civil society, with in-depth and long-term public engagement to think about what we want, how we might get there, and what happens if we fail.
Work with us
This thinking informs the Bristol Digital Futures Institute, which I am proud to co-lead with Dimitra Simeonidou, from network engineering. BDFI is a University Research Institute that supports collaborative research across all disciplines from Classics to Chemistry, Policy Studies to Physics and everything in between. BDFI focusses on the creation of digital technologies for more sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous societies.
Launched in September 2019 thanks to £29 million of capital investment from Research England and £71 million of commitments (from 27 research partners, the University of Bristol and philanthropic sources), we’re establishing globally unique facilities to support digital technology creation through sociotechnical research — including the world’s first ‘reality’ emulator. Despite the past year’s difficulties, we’re on track to open the doors to the first phase of this development (and the Institute’s physical home) in early 2022.
As the Institute’s programme builds we invite you — from civil society, business, academia and beyond — to collaborate with us. Disrupt with us. And create futures with us.
To join the conversation, sign up to our newsletter for upcoming events and opportunities and read our inaugural Impact Report.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble, Durham, Duke University Press.
Stirling, A. (2008). “Opening Up” and “Closing Down”: Power, Participation, and Pluralism in the Social Appraisal of Technology’ Science, Technology and Human Values 33 (2).