RAI Research Webinar: Anthropology and/of the Future

Anthropology and/of the future
presented by the RAI’s Anthropology of Policy and Practice Committee

held Monday 22 February 2021

with speakers:

Professor Kathleen Richardson, De Montfort University, author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines.

Professor Rebecca Bryant, Utrecht University, co-author of The Anthropology of the Future.

Stephen Oram, science fiction writer, author of Eating Robots, Biohacked and Begging and other works.

Chaired by Ezri Carlebach, coordinator for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, RAI Anthropology of Policy and Practice Committee.

Proponents of future or anticipatory anthropologies on the one hand, and post- and trans-humanist anthropologies on the other, appear to offer contradictory views of the role of anthropological knowledge of, and in, the future. While the former tend to take a human-centric and ethics-based stance, the latter posit the inevitability of a future that is something other than human.
Are these in effect mutually exclusive anthropologies? Does anthropology have a future in each of these potentially diverging futures? Should we be asking if ‘the future’ has a future?