From Reactive to Anticipatory Scholarship
Anthropology has traditionally been a discipline of the present and recent past, using ethnography to understand existing cultures. However, the rapid pace of technological change demands a new, future-oriented approach. At the Institute, we are pioneering speculative and anticipatory methods to study emerging technologies—like advanced AI, brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and pervasive AR—before they are fully integrated into society. The goal is not to predict the future, but to systematically explore multiple possible futures, identifying potential cultural consequences, ethical dilemmas, and points of intervention while there is still time to shape development pathways.
Toolkit for Anticipatory Anthropology
We employ a diverse set of forward-looking methods:
- Design Fiction and Ethnographic Prototyping: Creating tangible artifacts, videos, or detailed narratives from a future world to provoke discussion and make the implications of a technology feel real. For example, we might create a 'product manual' for a neural lace interface or a 'day-in-the-life' video of someone using emotion-recognition software, then use these fictions as prompts in focus groups and interviews to gather public reactions.
- Speculative Scenario Planning: Working with scientists, engineers, and diverse community stakeholders to build detailed scenarios of how a technology might unfold under different social, economic, and regulatory conditions. We create plural futures—utopian, dystopian, and mundane—to break away from deterministic thinking.
- Ethnography of R&D Labs and Innovation Hubs: Studying the cultures of the people creating future technologies today. What assumptions, values, and blind spots are baked into their prototypes? This 'upstream' ethnography can identify cultural biases before they are coded into systems.
- Delphi Panels and Expert Elicitation: Facilitating structured conversations among experts from disparate fields (ethics, law, art, engineering) to surface unforeseen consequences and generate consensus on research priorities.
Case Study: Anticipating the Social Life of General AI
As an example, our ongoing project on General AI moves beyond technical safety debates to ask anthropological questions: If an AI develops a semblance of personhood, how might different cultures integrate it? Would some religions grant it a soul? What new kinship categories might emerge (e.g., 'synthetic dependent')? How would labor markets and concepts of purpose be transformed? We run workshops where participants from various backgrounds role-play these scenarios, generating rich qualitative data on hopes, fears, and cultural readiness. Another project explores a future of 'climate adaptation technologies,' using speculative design to explore how geoengineering or vertical farming might create new social hierarchies and cultural practices.
This work is inherently interdisciplinary and interventionist. We collaborate closely with futurists, science fiction authors, and policymakers. The outputs are not just academic papers, but toolkits for tech companies, exhibits for museums, and workshops for civil society. By bringing anthropology's deep understanding of ritual, symbolism, power, and social structure to the process of technological imagination, we aim to democratize the future. We want to ensure that the question 'What kind of world do we want to build?' is informed by an understanding of what it means to be human, and that diverse voices are included in answering it. In a time of accelerating change, anticipatory anthropology is not a luxury but a vital form of responsible stewardship, helping to navigate toward futures that are more just, humane, and culturally vibrant.