Monday 16th September 2024 at University of Stirling.  

To attend please contact Vassilis Galanos

Emerging technologies come with the promise of disrupting the world as we know it while at the same time lacking the proof of their actual impact. Except for a few prototypes in R&D departments or research institutes, they exist primarily in the shared expectations and their potential applications. These expectations are called Technofutures. They communicate the technology towards a diverse group of stakeholders, attribute a certain meaning to the technology and create expectations long before it can be said that these expectations will actually hold. 

While Technofutures deal with potential future scenarios, they are created at a time, when there is limited or no existing knowledge regarding the likely trajectory of the respective technology, the potential products that may emerge from its development, or the possible repercussions of utilizing such products. This being said, Technofutures often follow a purely hypothetical and thus also speculative manner while at the same time shape the way we think and discuss emerging technologies.

Facing the situation that Technofutures, despite (or because of) their fictional character have an actual impact on the development of the technology, scholars from Science and Technology Studies STS and TA have turned towards Technofutures as objects of interests. They developed approaches to better understand the content, the spreading and the impact of techno-visionary communication. The shared characteristic of these approaches is that they view Technofutures not as predictions of what may or may not happen, but as reflections of the current state of affairs and compositions of existing knowledge, values, and attitudes.

This presentation offers an insight into the different perspectives on Technofutures and offers a framework for a structured assessment. Building up on Ricoeur's narrative hermeneutics, the framework will take into consideration different forms of figurations that become relevant when understanding how meaning is attributed through Technofutures. With this presentation, I aim to contribute to the methodological reflection on Technofutures (particular Hermeneutic TA) and offer a structured guidance through an otherwise often rather erratic research approach.

Biography

Wenzel Mehnert is PhD student at the Technical University of Belin, where he researches, writes and teaches experimental methods of futurology. In his work, Wenzel Mehnert focuses on the intersection between speculative fictions and the evaluation of new and emerging sciences and technologies (e.g. A.I., SynBio, Internet of Things, etc.). He worked as a researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, co-founded the Berlin Ethics Lab at the Technical University of Berlin and currently lives in Vienna, where he works at the Austrian Institute of Technology and works on the ethics of emerging technologies.