Baymax or HAL 9000? How Science-Fiction Prototyping Can Help Build Digital Trust

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have made enormous progress in recent years. As robots are already widely used in manufacturing and generative AI such as Chat GPT is becoming increasingly important in many white-collar jobs, AI promises a solution to the worsening labour shortage that many industrialised countries are already facing, or will soon be, facing.

Whether current technologies will fully fulfil this promise remains to be seen. What can be considered certain, however, is that AI will support people in many areas of life - from household tasks and care work to learning, collaboration and decision-making. While some welcome this development and emphasise the technology's potential not only to unleash human creativity but also to relieve the burden on social systems and even help rebuild the middle class (Author, 2024), others point out the risks that the still largely unregulated technologies may entail. The World Economic Forum's Global Risk Report 2024 even warns of the negative consequences of powerful pioneering technologies that could destabilise global economic and security dynamics.

This paper argues that science fiction prototyping is an approach for imagining and discussing fully digitalised futures with their positive and negative impacts. By immersing oneself in different scenarios, potential uses of AI can be understood and evaluated, potential risks become clearer and innovative ideas for as yet undiscovered fields of application emerge. This restores human agency in the age of AI and builds digital trust.