Towards Future Livespaces: Visions on the Power of AI to Antecipate

Deucalion debuts as a high-performance supercomputer engineered to tackle complex challenges such as numerical modeling, weather forecasting, and logistical optimization. Boasting a processing capacity of 10 million billion calculations per second, Deucalion is set to significantly enhance computational power across academia, industry, and public administration. The high-performance computing narrative is strongly endorsed by scientists and policymakers alike, who emphasize the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing modeling, forecasting, and data-driven computation.

This presentation draws on insights from social studies of science and time studies to critically examine the evolving societal role of AI, particularly its applications in anticipation and prediction. It explores how AI technologies, by enabling new forms of forecasting and anticipation, are reshaping daily social processes and redefining how individuals engage with both human and natural systems. These shifts invite reflection on long-standing questions about how AI is shapping we envision and prepare for future life.

Using key concepts such as promise, future, anticipation, and sociotechnical imaginaries, the presentation explores how these visions are being shaped, how scientists interact with them, and the critical role that social engagement plays in guiding AI’s development. It also underscores the importance of debating a "technically and scientifically" driven Anthropocene approach, with an emphasis on how AI is deeply reconfiguring structural models and taken-for-granted expectations about time and temporality across multiple dimensions of social life, from social.

The analysis draws on data from an ongoing research project.This includes netnographic analysis of media sources, semi-structured interviews with AI experts in decision-making roles, and focus groups with citizens discussing the future life landscapes envisioned by AI technologies, particulalry in domains in relation to the way people relate to the future (ever more known and antecipated).