Human Futures - AI Transitions in a Global Context is an international research initiative investigating how artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are reshaping societies, institutions, cultures, and knowledge production across diverse global contexts. Bringing together scholars from the Nordics, Asia, and Africa, it aims to foster a comparative, interdisciplinary conversation about AI and its societal implications.

At the inaugural workshop held at SCAS on 27-29 May 2026, roughly 30 researchers from varied disciplinary backgrounds identified emerging questions, tensions, and directions for future work within the initiative. The broader themes of the research initiative include how AI influences knowledge creation, academia, and academic agency.

Keynote speaker Anna Foka (Professor of Digital Humanities, Uppsala University) opened the workshop with a talk entitled “Human Futures, Machine Pasts: AI through Cultural Memory and Imagination.” She urged especially humanities scholars to engage directly with AI rather than cede the conversation to technology companies, emphasizing the need to address ethics, the appropriation of labor, and how technology intersects with meaningful human knowledge.

The call to act was initiated immediately by interdisciplinary discussions. Using personal objects that reflected their relationships to AI, along with post-its, whiteboards, and paper crafts, participants dove into intense discussions while thunder, hail, and heavy rain framed the sessions. Is AI a hammer – a tool scholars can employ in research – or a nail – a technology to be shaped to academic needs? How do we navigate a technology many did not request but that now affects our lives, work, and society?

Conversations quickly returned to fundamentals, underscoring the need for common ground before deeper inquiry. Which language do we use when we talk about AI, and what do our terms mean? Discussions often center on large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, but several participants reminded the group that AI predates these tools and has long been embedded in robotics, industry, and other technologies. Another central issue was the question of “we”: who is included – individuals, scholars, institutions, or society at large? Shared concerns included fears, challenges, and opportunities posed by AI. Participants also asked what question AI is supposed to be an answer to: Is that question the most relevant? What new, and perhaps unexpected, knowledge does exploring AI generate?

On day two, a creative mapping exercise visualized abstract and complex ideas. One map depicted the AI landscape as vessels at sea, the water symbolizing the absence of stable ground. Vessels were linked by invisible infrastructure like cables and surrounded by sea monsters representing unknowns that can be favorable or threatening. Technology raced ahead in a fast boat while academia followed in a large, slow vessel that struggles with rapid maneuvering. Workers, labor, and ethics appeared in a small, almost invisible boat – essential but often overlooked. Another map used stars to represent scholars who could guide the vessels forward. Additional landscapes included boats representing AI trajectories, forests of data, multi-layered mountains for local versus global dynamics, and vortexes of amplification.

These maps which were crafted from paper and shaped through interdisciplinary exchange, made collective thinking tangible. Crucially, open interdisciplinary discussion and disagreement without anxiety were the elements that brought these ideas into view.

Looking ahead, participants explored concrete actions to carry forward before the next workshop at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) in March 2027. Different communication channels, resource sharing, outreach to broader scholarly communities, and strategies to accelerate the pace of academic engagement with AI were some of the topics.

The interdisciplinary questioning and debate serve both as a form of resistance to the rapid rollout of technologies by large tech companies and as a means of integrating AI into scholarship to build useful, ethical futures for academia and society. The participating Institutes for Advanced Studies provide the space, time, and freedom to think. The conversation will continue.

Written by Natalie von der Lehr

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