Provocation Panel

Day 1: Thursday, 12 September

At a time when futures analysis overwhelmingly focuses on emerging technologies like AI, and geopolitical trends among powerful states, we risk losing sight of the human in ‘the future of humanity’. As founders of the Future Threats Lab at King’s College London, we are developing innovative human-centric methods for interrogating future threats. These share three pillars: 1) human actor(s) as the key referent object, rather than the strategic, economic and/or military referent objects that often lead to securitisation at the expense of humans; 2) a broad and diverse range of threats to human life and communal existence; 3) foregrounding the importance of human subjectivity in threat perceptions. Our aim is to facilitate futures analysis that is humane, inclusive, cross-disciplinary and collaborative, and to encourage critical reflection on the most serious issues of our time. Our Provocation Panel will demonstrate how human-centric futures methods challenge prevailing approaches within the futures field. First, they centre human communities, rather than states, ideologies, or status-quo institutions and hierarchies. Second, they consider an innovative and extensive typology of future threats, in contrast to X-risk approaches that focus solely on extinction-level events, or state-centric approaches that privilege threats to state/regime cohesion. Finally, they account for subjectivity within threat perceptions and the possibility of analytical distortion. Our interactive session will present the human-centric approach and include examples of how such methods can produce more inclusive and actionable analysis. We hope our panel will encourage critical reflection as participants engage with futures methods presented at the conference.