Who is making claims over sociodigital futures?

This is the third in a series of three podcasts exploring ‘Claiming Tomorrow – Sociodigital Futures in the Making.’

'Who is making claims over sociodigital futures' looks at which actors are making futures claims. Should we pay heed to government announcements around the capabilities of AI and how it will change our lives? Can any single actor make such sweeping generalisations when there are many possible futures in front of us?

Hear from Dale Southerton, Susan Halford and Helen Manchester in this fascinating and timely discussion.

This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and globally.  The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.

Transcript

00:00:10 Narrator 

This podcast is brought to you by the ESRC Centre for Socio Digital Futures or CENSOF, a flagship research centre led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other universities exploring socio digital futures in the making. The support of the economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. 

00:00:31 Dale Southerton 

Welcome to Claiming Tomorrow: Socio digital futures in the making. Episode 3 who? 

00:00:37 Dale Southerton 

I'm Professor Dale Southerton and I'm a Co director of the centre. Before I introduce the panel I have with me a quick word about what we're discussing today. 

00:00:47 Dale Southerton 

This podcast is one of a series of three we produce that together. Explore one of the research questions we're investigating here at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures. 

00:00:56 Dale Southerton 

That is what social digital futures are being claimed and made, and how, by which actors across key areas of social life. 

00:01:06 Dale Southerton 

In this episode, we're going to be discussing where some of these socio digital futures claims are coming from and who is making them. 

00:01:14 Dale Southerton 

If you enjoyed this podcast and haven't already listened to the others, you'll find these on our website along with lots of other information about our work and research aims. 

00:01:25 Dale Southerton 

I'm joined here by two colleagues. 

00:01:27 Susan Halford 

Hello, I'm professor Susan Halford. I'm the other Co director of the centre. 

00:01:31 Helen Manchester 

And I'm professor Helen Manchester. I'm a professor of participatory socio digital futures and a Co-I in the centre. 

00:01:39 Dale Southerton 

Thanks and great to have you both here. So just to start us off, can you explain to the listeners what we mean by socio digital features claims? 

00:01:49 Dale Southerton 

What does it mean to claim the future? 

00:01:51 Susan Halford 

Thank you. That's a really interesting question. I'm going to start by answering it with an observation that I think most people listening to this would recognise, which is simply to say that digital technologies are now, and increasingly, embedded in all areas of social life in multiple different ways. And because digital technologies are so embedded in social life. 

00:02:12 Susan Halford 

It becomes increasingly difficult to separate the social from the digital, which is why we use this word, socio digital, which is the first part of your question. 

00:02:21 Susan Halford 

And we know that, and we can explore that when we look at the past and when we look at the present and there's lots of excellent research that does that. But it becomes much harder to think about when we think about the future and what socio digital futures might be. And the reason that's really difficult is because it hasn't happened yet. The socio digital future. 

00:02:41 Susan Halford 

Has not yet happened, but also because we know that the relationships between technology and social life are really complicated and things tend not to turn out in the way that people imagine they will do in the future. 

00:02:54 Susan Halford 

If we look back and think about how people talked about cars when they were first invented and what that would do in the world, or the Internet, this turned out very, very differently from how people imagined. So the future is really difficult. There isn't one future. There's many. 

00:03:09 Susan Halford 

But for all of that, there's lots and lots of people around who want to tell us what the future is. There's lots and lots of people claiming that they know what socio digital futures are, and we could, given what I've said, just ignore that and say it doesn't matter because it's not what the future is. We have to wait and see. 

00:03:26 Susan Halford 

But our starting point in the center is it really, really matters what kinds of claims are being made because those claims have important effects in the world in the present. So, for example, when governments claim to know the future, that drives policy changes. When industry claims to do that, it drives massive investments. 

00:03:48 Susan Halford 

Across the globe, creates jobs, loses jobs, or when science fiction writers or popular culture in films or TV series make claims about technologies, think about Black Mirror, technologies and the future that shapes popular imaginations and perhaps decisions that people make about their own lives. 

00:04:06 Susan Halford 

So the point is that claiming futures claiming socio digital futures really matters, and it's something that we need to pay attention to and that drives a lot of the research we do in the centre. 

00:04:18 Dale Southerton 

Thanks, Susan. Helen, how do you think about futures claims, particularly in relation to socio digital phenomena? 

00:04:25 Helen Manchester 

Thanks, Susan. That's really interesting. I think for me, it's how those claims that are being made work on people in the present and the effects that those have in ordinary people. 

00:04:37 Helen Manchester 

Running their lives in the present. So the claims that are being made by big technology companies or governments act on people in the present and they create a situation where some kind of futures are seen as inevitable in some way. And that's very difficult as someone who is living their life in a community somewhere. 

00:04:58 Helen Manchester 

To start to imagine things differently, I think so. These claims are very strong and they present a kind of trajectorism towards one certain kind of future. 

00:05:08 Helen Manchester 

And I think it means that many of us feel that we don't have agency in thinking about futures, even though actually we're acting on futures all the time in the present. 

00:05:20 Dale Southerton 

Great. Interpreting that 

00:05:22 Dale Southerton 

Does that mean that futures for... I guess if you want to use language like everyday people just keep it general, does that mean that futures can feel like they are sort of thrust upon people and as if they're inevitable and that then can does that make people feel anxious? What what are the implications of that? What do you think? 

00:05:40 Helen Manchester 

I think it in relation to socio digital futures in particular. 

00:05:44 Helen Manchester 

So we've done quite a lot of work in the centre where we're talking to communities who have experienced a range of different inequalities throughout their life courses and for them in particular, there's a sense that technological change is happening at a rate that is leaving them behind. There's a sense of powerlessness. There's a sense of. 

00:06:04 Helen Manchester 

Overwhelm about the kind of changes that are taking place, and I think that leads to to them feeling very much like not like they don't have agency in relation to some of those really big socio digital claims that season was talking about earlier. Yeah. And also how it makes us feel in the present, I think that that there's a lot around futures. 

00:06:25 Helen Manchester 

And how? 

00:06:26 Helen Manchester 

A sense of futurelessness, almost, from a lot of the communities that we're working alongside, and this is also perpetuated by the claims that are made through science fiction through, you know, art and design, that that are imagining dystopic socio digital features or or what we've seen as. 

00:06:46 Helen Manchester 

Often blue futures and so say more about that if you want. 

00:06:51 Dale Southerton 

Yeah, well, maybe, maybe we can come back to it, but does it does this mean that people feel like they're being carried along with futures that that they're excluded from essential features that they have? No, no. Say in, carried along on the thrust of. 

00:07:04 Dale Southerton 

AI or robots or...? 

00:07:06 Helen Manchester 

I think what we've often found is when we are asking people to talk about. So we've been focusing on connection as a way into talking about the socio digital in the work that we've been doing and what we find is when we're talking about past and the present and how they feel about connection, there's a lot of positive stories to tell. There's a real sense of how the social and the digital are. 

00:07:27 Helen Manchester 

Intertwined and they work together and that they have some agency in thinking about, for example, they're an older person saying well. 

00:07:36 Helen Manchester 

My son bought me an Alexa, but I've put it in the garage because I don't want to use it or someone saying I don't want to be available 24/7 on the phone. So I just turned my phone off. But when we start talking about futures, there's a real shift in the conversation and it seems like there's a real sense of powerlessness there where, like, well, we know this AI is coming, we're all going to lose our jobs. 

00:07:56 Helen Manchester 

It's a problem that we have to deal with when we're thinking about how do we make visible some of those potentially alternative ways of thinking about socio digital futures. 

00:08:08 Dale Southerton 

Yeah, great. Because that feels like then they're very responsive to claims about futures that are being made not by themselves. Someone else. So Susan, who are making the futures claims? 

00:08:17 Susan Halford 

Yes, I was just thinking when Helen was talking. Actually, if we think about Keir Starmer's speech in January earlier this year where he was presenting the governments AI action plan, I really suggest people go and look at the full text of that. 

00:08:29 Susan Halford 

Because there is a series of really, really strong claims about what AI will be in the future and what it will do. 

00:08:36 Susan Halford 

And they build up, they layer up one on top of the other. So AI is going to halve the amount of time that social workers spend on paperwork. AI is going to help the fight in tax avoidance. AI is going to create thousands of jobs, put money in people's pockets and bring prosperity to the UK. So there's this series of layered certainties. 

00:08:56 Susan Halford 

About what AI will do 

00:08:58 Susan Halford 

That ends up with “and Is the UK going to be a maker where it leads this future or is it going to be a taker where it buys the future from other countries that are ahead of it?” So it's a really, really interesting interestingly constructed argument that makes it impossible. 

00:09:17 Susan Halford 

Or very difficult to resist the trajectory because it's just weaving in all these different aspects of all these different parts of life. So government clearly plays a really important role and and governments role is important because actually often industry will look to governments to. 

00:09:34 Susan Halford 

Kind of pump prime investments in AI. You know where it's a bit risky in some areas. They're looking for government to, in fact, Starmer says this in his speech to rewire governments to become an AI government, not only to demonstrate what AI might do, but also obviously as a market because government is buying its AI systems from industry. 

00:09:55 Susan Halford 

So industry are another big part of this. They're the people that develop these technologies. It's an existential question for them. If they, if they don't create technologies that have a market, they're not in business anymore. So they need to be claiming the future confidently and assertively. 

00:10:11 Susan Halford 

I think we could think of lots of other actors actually that are involved in that, a slightly different one would be to think about standards bodies which might sound a bit arcane and boring, but all of these big technical systems, they have to have standards to which they operate in order for them all to join up and work together. And these bodies play an increasingly important part in shaping the future. 

00:10:33 Susan Halford 

Because they decide what kind of specifications the technologies. 

00:10:36 Susan Halford 

Have how they should speak to each other. What kind of levels of failure or success they're allowed in the services that they provide. So there there's lots and lots of really interesting bodies that are all involved, not just in talking about the future. 

00:10:52 Susan Halford 

But actually putting in place systems, structures, infrastructures that make some futures much more likely than other kinds of futures 

00:11:02 Dale Southerton 

So when you say they're putting in infrastructure that makes them, do you mean build in a 6G network and the capacity that's needed in that network makes it more likely that that will be the future? 

00:11:12 Susan Halford 

Yep, absolutely. So I mean we can think about infrastructures in all kinds of ways. It could be 60, the next generation networks. So we're used to 4G, 5G and now 6G, which will fundamentally one of the big differences of 6G is that it will have AI embedded in the heart of it. 

00:11:28 Susan Halford 

And there isn't a 6G yet. There's a kind of global race going on, and particularly we have big competitions between global superpowers like China and the US, with competing claims about the future, not necessarily about the technologies in general, but specifically about what kinds of technologies, what kinds of standards, what forms of industry ownership and industry. 

00:11:50 Susan Halford 

Market relationships. So that would be one example. Another one would be infrastructure like data centres for example, very topical conversation again to go back to the speech, Labour government wants to bring lots of data centres to the UK. 

00:12:05 Susan Halford 

And increasing those discussions about what that means environmentally in terms of water and energy consumption. And I think all of that, it's really important that we pay attention to claims and counterclaims around that because it's very easy to claim a future where it hasn't happened yet, actually and which kinds of claims stick. 

00:12:25 Susan Halford 

And which don't is not a done deal I think, and that goes back to Helen's point about how do we kind of shift or multiply the kinds of claims that are in the ecosystem about what sorts of social digital futures might be possible. 

00:12:40 Dale Southerton 

Yeah, and it's probably important to say that some of the research that's going on in the centre is looking at some of these futures claims. 

00:12:46 Dale Southerton 

Data centers and the environmental implications and the forms of inclusion and exclusion that are there. I just wanted to ask a question with actually thanks to both of you really, which is. 

00:12:57 Dale Southerton 

Susan, the examples you've given are kind of really big things. Governments, big tech and so on. And are there other kinds of claims going on here? I'm thinking of, for example, some of the work that I've been involved in around the future of the television. Many, many consultants and people with different kinds of  

00:13:17 Dale Southerton 

Vested interests that are making claims about what the future of the television will be, and in doing that they're making claims about what the future of our homes will be like and how we're going to live live within them. So can you just talk a bit more about some of these relationships between kind of big government? 

00:13:33 Dale Southerton 

And the average person in a community somewhere. 

00:13:39 Helen Manchester 

So I think the interesting thing for me here in, in the relationships between claims and claimants is that people have very different sense of power, a sense of their own power or a sense of agency in relation to how they make these claims about features. So. 

00:13:58 Helen Manchester 

For the groups that we've been working alongside, there is, as I've said, that real sense of powerlessness, which means that when you ask people about futures, they suggest it might have nothing to do with them. Like what have I got to do with futures and and? And why? Why would I be thinking about futures? I'm actually more worried about, like, what's going to happen tomorrow. 

00:14:18 Helen Manchester 

Because I don't have enough money to feed my kids or something, and when we talk to community organisations, they tell us, well, we can't really ask people about futures because we're dealing with the immediate problems of today, all the time. 

00:14:31 Helen Manchester 

So I think for us in the centre though we're. 

00:14:35 Helen Manchester 

We actually think that people do have ideas about futures and they do have ideas about what they would like to happen in relation to social digital futures, in their communities, in their everyday lives. So what we've been trying to do is to work with people to make visible some of those dreams 

00:14:55 Helen Manchester 

Some of those wishes, some of those desires that they might have, but in that trying to make things visible and tangible. 

00:15:04 Helen Manchester 

We always coming across that sense that well, what's the point because we know that the big tech companies, we know that what government is saying about this, they're not really listening to us and the the things that we think are important in how we are imagining futures. So why would we bother to do to do that? 

00:15:23 Helen Manchester 

Let's just survive. Let's just wake up every morning and do our days. So we're hearing that a lot. So I think that sense of power, that really important work that I think should be happening and that we're trying to do in the centre of making visible some. 

00:15:38 Helen Manchester 

Those other ideas about what features could be and when we're doing that work, we're finding that people do have really great ideas about what associated digital features could feel like look like. And it's just really, it's that question of how do we make that visible in a in a place where those claims that are being made by. 

00:15:58 Helen Manchester 

Others that Susan has talked about are so, so strong and dominant, I guess. 

00:16:04 Dale Southerton 

Is one of the reasons for this kind of distinction, this difference 

00:16:08 Dale Southerton 

That when you're talking to people in in communities, their starting point for the future is not technology as such. It's what what would make my life better or what would be a good life. Whereas when Keir Starmer was talking about AI. 

00:16:22 Dale Southerton 

He's starting with technology, so technology is the future. And then from from there, he's making a whole range of futures claim. 

00:16:30 Dale Southerton 

So Susan, is that a good way of describing it? You know, one starts with technology and the other one starting with their day-to-day life or is. 

00:16:37 Dale Southerton 

It something different? 

00:16:37 Susan Halford 

I think I think it's a bit more complicated in a way and that I think in that particular case of the AI action plan, there's a very big effort to recognise that AI needs to be. 

00:16:49 Susan Halford 

Valuable and useful and valued by people otherwise, it's not worth anything. So I think that's why there's so much reference to things like fighting tax avoidance and giving doctors and nurses more time to be caring rather than doing paperwork or whatever. So I think. 

00:17:04 Susan Halford 

There is a sort of effort in a way to say, look, AI is going to be really good for people and for you in your life. It's going to be more jobs, more money in your pocket. 

00:17:13 Susan Halford 

So on the one hand, I'm kind of disagreeing, but actually I really agree with what you're saying because. 

00:17:19 Susan Halford 

From those kind of big approaches, there's very little understanding of how technology is going to intertwine with everyday life in schools, in homes, in people's lives, to produce those really positive outcomes. So the positive outcomes are stated. 

00:17:39 Susan Halford 

Including things that matter to people, but there are very, very few mechanisms that will really recognise all the changes that would need to take place in order for that to happen. And I think the default often with governments is to talk about attitudes. 

00:17:53 Susan Halford 

And to say, well, do people like AI or not? Well, whether people like it or not, is is not the main thing that's going to drive the changes that happen, it will be much more around the kind. 

00:18:04 Susan Halford 

Of way in which AI becomes embedded in systems like hospitals or schools or whatever, but also the way that people's lives are lived. It's not just about attitudes, it's about the way that things get done and the way that people organise their lives. And I think one really strong message from the center would be that we need to look at socio digital practices and socio digital. 

00:18:26 Susan Halford 

Futuring practices in order to make a step change in how we think about claiming and acting on these futures that are in the making 

00:18:33 Dale Southerton 

I'm gonna just for the listeners just clarify social digital practices. So I'm assuming by that you mean just the things that happen people do in their day-to-day lives. And the way in which digital technologies are kind of just embedded, increasingly so. 

00:18:48 Dale Southerton 

Recently we tried to count up how many digital screens there are in the world. Hey, I can't answer that question, which is interesting and we got to 30 billion and we didn't include in that tablets, iPads and so on. We just gave up at that, so 30 billion, so many more than there are people. So is that what you mean when we're talking social digital practices, the ways in which these technologies, these digital technologies? 

00:19:04 Susan Halford 

Yeah, yeah. 

00:19:11 Dale Southerton 

And all the data and everything associated with them are getting more and more embedded in our day-to-day lives, the things that we do. 

00:19:18 Susan Halford 

Absolutely. And it's it's, you know, some of that we choose to do some of it. We have no choice about doing. But if we think about many of the things we do, whether it's cooking or shopping or leisure activities, watching films or whatever, many of these things it is digital technologies and digital data and digital devices are just there and we are negotiating them. 

00:19:37 Susan Halford 

Managing them, paying for them, losing them, whatever. But we're we're kind of making those things happen. Perhaps not under conditions of our own choosing, but we are making them happen through the practices that we engage in all the time, every day. 

00:19:51 Dale Southerton 

OK. That makes a lot of sense. So then what's new about this? Because presumably in the past, futures have been claimed by governments and big business and many others and they that's impacted on our day-to-day lives. So is there something new about socio digital futures and futures claims? 

00:20:10 Helen Manchester 

I would say, and I think I've noticed through the research that we're doing. 

00:20:14 Helen Manchester 

That there is and and I know people have made these suggestions before with other new technologies that come into being. But I think with artificial intelligence and the sense of the collection of data around our lives, I'm finding that people are increasingly feeling left behind. They're feeling like it's something that they don't. 

00:20:35 Helen Manchester 

Control that they can't control, that they don't understand. 

00:20:38 Helen Manchester 

And and they can't hope to understand because of the rapid development of these technologies and probably we can go back to the past and learn from other technological changes and how people felt about that too. But I think I am certainly finding that there are kind of resistance practices emerging at the moment, for example. 

00:20:58 Helen Manchester 

Parents, in particular villages or communities coming together to decide they're not going to buy smartphones for their kids until they're like 14 or something and making it easier. Or I've met young people recently have decided not to have smartphones and to do that deliberately because they feel like they're taking over their lives. 

00:21:18 Helen Manchester 

We've heard a lot about digital detox holidays. I'm feeling there's a sense and I'm kind of hopeful about this. But you know, maybe it's just me wanting to be hopeful that maybe there will be a tipping point where people start saying we're not sure about this. These claims that are being made. 

00:21:38 Helen Manchester 

And the way that technology is developing right now is this really what we want. So I'm an eternal optimist. I put my hands up to that where. 

00:21:47 Helen Manchester 

That's how I would probably answer that question. 

00:21:49 Dale Southerton 

Yeah. Thanks. I mean there is, you know, historical cases, the public are always skeptical about new technologies in in a way and and fear them and so on. I suppose in a sense what you're saying is it's almost kind of like it's the scale of it, it's it's, it's not just you know when you think of there's a really famous study of. 

00:22:08 Dale Southerton 

People not wanting water in their homes because they thought they would be taxed and there were protests in London, you know, and this is something that has improved public health massively. But that was a singular, big but singular, thing. Whereas in this case and we're talking, like you said, the example of AI, it's everywhere and you can't see it as well. And and that does that. 

00:22:28 Dale Southerton 

Masturbate the senses that you're talking about. 

00:22:29 Helen Manchester 

Yeah, absolutely. I think so from what we've heard, you know that sense of just it, it's overwhelming. It's everywhere and nowhere. 

00:22:38 Helen Manchester 

We can't see it. It's not tangible. Futures are never tangible, really. But even the tech in the present is becoming increasingly intangible, and we don't see it and it's very difficult to to know how to negotiate, as Susan was talking about. I think people are struggling with that piece of negotiating. How? 

00:22:59 Helen Manchester 

Technology fits with the way that they want to leave their lives and the way that they want to attempt to have a good life. If to come back to what you said Dale as well. 

00:23:10 Susan Halford 

Yeah, I agree. I agree with all the things Helen said that and I'm going to answer the question slightly differently. So I think the question is, is there anything different now from the past? The past is an excellent reminder of how future making claims then we're wrong. So I think that's just, let's just remember that the two things I'd say that I think a different one is pace. 

00:23:31 Susan Halford 

You know, nobody was talking about generative AI two years ago, 2 1/2 years ago now. It's almost all anybody can talk about. In fact, it's almost what people think AI is, is ChatGPT. 

00:23:42 Susan Halford 

And clearly it's not. And that's my second point. The thing that's different is the. 

00:23:46 Susan Halford 

The multiplicity you know, the different forms that something like AI or digital data and the data economy take. It's not one thing, it's many. So we can plate. 

00:23:59 Susan Halford 

Examples and the use of AI in detecting cancerous cells in hospitals with AI monitoring us and facial recognition and policing. You know these these are in some ways related technologies, but they also are very differently positioned in everyday life and in the power relations and the institutional structures that we've talked about. 

00:24:21 Susan Halford 

And I think it's that I was almost going to say ubiquity. That's a very old term in terms of thinking about ubiquitous computing. But it is that diversity and ubiquity with which digital data technologies devices are embedded across almost every aspect of life and. 

00:24:37 Susan Halford 

It's very hard to have a I like it or I don't like it position because it it all depends on what it is and when and where and for who. And that makes it very difficult to grasp, I think. 

00:24:49 Dale Southerton 

Great. Thanks and thank you both for what's been a really interesting discussion. 

00:24:53 Susan Halford 

Thank you. Thank you. 

00:24:55 Narrator 

To find out more about the centre for Socio Digital Futures, visit the University of Bristol's website, where you can read about our research, follow us on social media and sign up to our mailing list. Thanks so much for listening.