VTT held “futures workshops” at the beginning of the project with the aim to bring new perspectives to the societal impacts of the emerging technologies. Separate workshops were held for all the six technology frameworks (Human-centric solutions and human-machine-interaction, Bio-inspired technologies and smart materials, Real time-based digital twins and simulation, Cyber safe data transmission, storage, and analysis technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Technologies for energy efficiency and trustworthy autonomy) and their societal impacts in the long term. Working with technology framework experts from the industry and the academia, including social scientists with framework related expertise, we produced futures images and narratives for life in 2050 from the perspective of each technology framework.
In order to make the ideas presented accessible and comprehensible to a wider audience, VTT, worked closely with a visual artist and art educator.
The ideas from the six workshops were turned into 12 small stories, brought together by a meta narrative of a logbook of the ship Theseus, sailing the seas of the Earth in 2050. Through joining the travels of Theseus we are learning about different imaginaries of ways of life, affected by novel technologies.
All stories will be made available on the FORGING web pages (https://forging-hub.eu/).
We encourage you to take a look and reflect on the possibilities that novel technologies open up for societies!