Human Futures - AI Transitions in a Global Context

Published: 12 October 2026

Summary
This episode of SCAS Talks Spotlight explores the first workshop of the research initiative “Human Futures - AI Transitions in a Global Context”, held in May 2026 at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Developed with partners in Sweden, Japan and South Africa, the initiative brings scholars together to examine AI’s social implications across regions and disciplines. The conversation asks how to move beyond technical accounts and challenge claims that AI is universal, recognizing that technologies take shape within particular histories, cultures and communities. It highlights the humanities’ essential role: interpreting meanings, questioning assumptions, attending to ethics and power, and keeping human experience central to technological change. Participants also emphasize academic diplomacy, intellectual freedom and transcontinental collaboration as foundations for responsible, inclusive futures with AI.

Keywords
Artificial intelligence, humanities, global perspectives, interdisciplinary research, academic diplomacy

Transcript of the Episode

Edward Kirumira 00:09
You're not asking them to start with theory. You're asking them to start with a lived experience. This animal that is affecting and impacting scholarship. I mean, they're dealing with AI on a daily basis. It's something they're living with, and giving them the opportunity to shape the discourse around it - I think is really is absolutely fantastic.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:44
Welcome to SCAS Talks and to an episode in our series SCAS Talks Spotlight, focusing on the first workshop within the research initiative Human Futures - AI Transitions in a Global Context. This first workshop was held in May 2026 in Uppsala at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Human Futures is an international research initiative investigating how artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are reshaping societies, institutions, cultures, and knowledge production across diverse global contexts.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 01:19
This initiative is a result of dialogs between the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the Wallenberg AI Autonomous Systems and Software Program Humanities and Society, in collaboration with Tokyo College in Japan and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study from South Africa. bringing together scholars across the globe, the program aims to foster a comparative interdisciplinary conversation about AI and its societal implications.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:44
Our names are Natalie von der Lehr

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 01:46
and Nicholas Scrutton Alvarado. This is the first workshop of three. In this podcast, we bring you some of the background of this research initiative, as well as some of the issues that were discussed.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:57
We begin with a call to action from the keynote speaker Anna Foka. Anna Foka is a rofessor in digital humanities at Uppsala University, where she studies the intersection between technology, culture, and memory.

Anna Foka 02:11
Technology has tremendous possibilities and tremendous pitfalls, and if we don't sit and talk about it, it's going to be in the hands of a company. And please don't do that. Think about the ethics. Think about those people whose work is appropriated. Think about all the appropriating pictures of you know people and nations. We can't let this happen. We have to work with it, and we have to work with human knowledge that has meaning. I'm not saying that computer development does not have any meaning. I'm just saying that we have to work together. This is a great challenge for humanity. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 02:44
Anna directly names a key motivation for this initiative. Artificial intelligence seems like it's everywhere, and it's not slowing down. Scholars across academia, from the sciences to the humanities, can either take an active role in its development or risk being at the mercy of private companies.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:01
Let's hear more about the research initiative "Human Futures" from the steering group. We let them introduce themselves.

Ericka Johnson 03:08
My name is Ericka Johnson, and I'm a professor of gender and society at Linköping University. And here I'm also representing the management team of WASP-HS.

Christina Garsten 03:18
And I'm Christina Garsten. I'm professor of social anthropology, and I'm the principal of SCAS, and I'm also in the steering committee of this initiative.

Edward Kirumira 03:27
And I'm Edward, Edward Kirumira. I'm the professor of medical sociology and director of Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch.

Naoko Shimazu 03:37
Hello, I'm Naoko Shimazu. I'm member of the steering committee, and I'm professor and deputy director of Tokyo College, which is an Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Tokyo, and I'm historian by trade.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:52
Great, thank you very much. So we're here for the workshop "Human Futures: AI Transition in a Global Context", and this is a research initiative. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?

Christina Garsten 04:04
Well, like many interesting research initiatives, this started by conversations that I had with Christofer Edling, who is actually the program director for this larger scheme of research from the Wallenberg side, and we thought that this was a theme that could very well be dealt with at Institutes for Advanced Study, where people convene from all over the world, primarily in humanities and social sciences, but not only, to see what could happen if we gather people from different continents together, immerse themselves into this very interesting complex of questions. And then I invited Edward and Naoko to come up with ideas to this initiative, and together we drafted a plan that we then shared with Christofer and he very creatively also engaged in this process and contributed, and together we came up with this program idea, and we are very happy and excited that this actually is supported by the Wallenberg Foundation and that we are able to do this at our three Institutes for Advanced Study.

Naoko Shimazu 05:22
I just like to say how impressed I've been with the globality of the vision, because it really does try to connect the three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. And I think this is quite unique. And also, particularly using the Institute for Advanced Study as a platform for this kind of conversation, which often tends to take place in a more kind of techy environment.

Ericka Johnson 05:46
I think one of the contributions that this whole program can make is trying to change the existing sheen of universality that a lot of the knowledge being produced through AI tends to assume. We've gathered people from many different disciplines and also very many different geographical locations, and we're realizing through the conversations that we're having here that AI is not only very multiple in its uses, but also the knowledge production from it is, of course, also like all data, very localized and situated. And this is something that I think is missed in a lot of the conversations about AI, which tends to be imagined as producing a universalist view from nowhere type of knowledge production. And here we're seeing that by bringing different voices together, we're able to create a foundational understanding of AI as situated, which is quite a new step forward in the conversations we're having around AI.

Edward Kirumira 06:49
Just to follow up on the idea of the creativity and the power, in a way, of Institutes for Advanced Study as creative spaces for the mind. When I was here, when SCAS was celebrating 40th anniversary, I think I was challenged to apply the creative spaces that Institutes for Advanced Study provide to a larger, connected way. So rather than having individual, almost independent Institutes for advanced study - how we can expand. And I think it's been a learning to take a theme and apply it within that space and see how it reimagines the way we look at artificial intelligence. So it's really pushing ourselves to put our Institutes for Advanced Study for the service of scholarship. And I think that's really been exciting that we move beyond just providing the space to an individual, but throwing these individuals in context, in networks, and push the conversation and shape it in a way.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 08:04
So this is a fascinating initiative, as you said, bringing intellectuals from the whole world. But what I'm curious about is delving a little bit more into the need that you felt when you were creating this initiative, both in the timing as well as the need for a global composition.

Christina Garsten 08:23
Very good question. Well, if you look outside the window today, there are many challenges in the world that also affect the academic world, so to speak, and also Institutes for Advanced Study. And perhaps the general tendency is to draw inwards to close boundaries and to shrink, and that may also mean that we shrink in our outlook and in our intellectual capacity. But we thought that rather than doing so, why not insist on global collaborations, on investigating the plural perspectives and experiences of AI in this case, and bringing different kinds of experiences and academic capabilities into dialog, and sustain it across continents and over time, and thereby doing what we can to mitigate the shrinkage that is going on in the world. So by insisting on keeping up the dialog, engaging in very critical questions that may influence and already are influencing our futures, let's be part of that. Let's see what we can do to investigate what's going on, but also to create linkages across our continents and across all the pluralities of experiences that we bring with us. So it's in a way a long-term investment, I would say, in what you can call academic diplomacy. For knowledge, for creativity, but also for humanities in the future.

Ericka Johnson 10:05
I think, as people who have the ability at this point in our careers to direct a bit of resources and a bit of opportunity, especially towards junior scholars, which this is focusing on, it's also our responsibility to not only listen to the voices that are the loudest in the conversations, but also to engage a more plural epistemological approach.

Naoko Shimazu 10:27
The environment that IASs aspire to create and have created, you know, to different degrees, gives them freedom of thinking, freedom of thought, freedom to get out of their usual disciplinary boundaries. So you can actually express opinions that you perhaps would not dare to express, right, In discipline-based departments, because you might seem so far out. And that's what I've been getting - that the excitement of being able to sort of think outside of your boundaries. So I think that's a really important space that we're creating here on a transcontinental level.

Edward Kirumira 11:05
I think that now the opportunity to provide spaces for actually come and think, and what a better way than getting the the younger scholars because it's their world that really is out there, and there is an excitement you feel that you're not asking them to start with theory; you're asking them to start with a lived experience. This animal that is affecting and impacting scholarship. I mean, they're dealing with AI on a daily basis with their students, with it's something they're living with, and giving them the opportunity to shape the discourse around it, I think is really is absolutely fantastic.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:58
Artificial intelligence is often associated with the sciences, but dismissing the humanities risks ignoring a crucial aspect of scholarship and missing on the advantages researchers of these disciplines can bring. We talk to Anna Foka once again. What can the humanities bring to the AI discussion?

Anna Foka 12:19
Oh, critical perspectives, I hope. Critical perspectives and perhaps deep knowledge that concerns specific fields and specific contexts and specific cultural phenomena and perhaps generally an understanding of the world in a global sense as we see fit. But also, I think as a as a humanist, and I started myself in a very antiquarian way. I mean, I have a background in classical studies and archeology of the ancient world, and I have a little bit of a background in media and performance studies. And I think humanities is is not - I mean, none of the fields is monolithic. Even medical science have its branches, but humanities can differ very, very much. So, for example, the analytical tools that we have in art history could be completely different to the analytical tools that we have for archeology, or they could coincide somewhere. And I think humanities can bring all of these varied perspectives. I can give an example if you like. So, by looking at a picture that is by an indigenous community in Sweden, we could combine the work of a person that is an expert in photography, the work of an expert that is an anthropologist or a cultural anthropologist, the work of an expert who is in media studies, a historian, a historian of Sweden, a historian of indigenous studies. So I think the approach of humanities can be very modular in the sense that it will circle around and work around in a way that it will contribute to the research question, and I think that's the beauty of it. And the same applies to social sciences, of course, and the arts, in that sense, just with different calibrations again.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 13:53
This workshop served many purposes. It brought together scholars not only across disciplines but across nations. We talked to Arisa Ema, an associate professor at Tokyo College. What perspectives do you think Japanese AI researchers can bring to the global conversation that kind of the symposium is trying to embody?

Arisa Ema 14:13
So maybe the Japanese computer scientists or maybe engineers. What I think the uniqueness of them is to think about more like the AI as a partner or AI companion. So the thing that we actually discussed today, or what I heard today, is more like using AI as a tool. So many people actually, you know, mentioned about how to use it wisely or how we can use it in smart way, but some of the Japanese researchers, especially like robotics or AI scientists, who actually start their research in fucking 80s or 70s, so not the recent deep learning researchers, wanted to understand the human being. So they actually do more like a constructive approach. So they build the AI, or they made the AI because they wanted to understand the human being. And in that sense, the researcher's aspiration is to understand human being. So some of the researchers are actually are making kind of nurturing baby AI so that they can get the sense of the environment. I think you know we are right now actually talking about the physical AI or embodied AI, so how the robots AI can interact with the environment. But I think some of the robotists or the AI researchers are already thinking about how we can not create tools as AI, but how we can well educate or nurture AI to become one of the quasi member of the society, so this kind of the word quasi member is the term actually used in the principles of the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence. So they made the principles for the AI researchers, and the AI researcher should have some kind of sense of accountability, responsibility, or the sense of the human right. And the last article is to say that this kind of item should be also up by the AI itself as well to become a quasi member of the society.

Natalie von der Lehr 16:19
One of the strength of this research initiative is that it allows scholars with different perspectives to interact and reflect. We talk to Jean Louis Fendji, associate professor at the University of Ngaoundere in Cameroon, and Iso-Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

Jean Louis Fendji 16:38
I'm working especially on digital inclusion, how we can connect in a responsible way those who are not connected for the moment, and they represent currently 2.2 billion that are not online and that are somehow excluded from the digital landscape that is shaping the AI. And as we are talking about human futures and AI transition in a global context, we need to pay attention to the fact that one size doesn't fit all. That means we should look at a kind of pluriversal AI and the particularities of each community to make sure that the way they are included in the in this era is fair to them. And the discussion we had here today, especially around thinking about AI in in our context, I think it is very important and useful. First of all, the way we we creating groups for reflection coming from different background. And we use the image of a mountain or a chain of mountain with several peak, with some people at the top having a guide, a kind of global view, but when we see from a distance, we cannot pay attention or we cannot distinguish the particularities that can be found in the valley. And we need to go down the valley to observe the realities and also to take them into consideration. That means at the top we can have some services that are somehow useful at the global level, but we also need to go down to the valley to also observe the particularities that we need also to include in the discussion.

Grant Otsuki 18:33
One of the things that you know is is kind of hanging in the back of my mind all the time, but never, doesn't often come to the surface is thinking about inequality in the way that it's come up here. And I think that's especially important because we're thinking across different national and cultural and well continental contexts. Basically, for instance, the discussion in Japan is about aging a lot of the time, right? The people are getting old, and who's going to work, and who's going to keep productivity, you know. So AI is seen as a way to address that social issue and future issue. But when I hear, especially from colleagues from South Africa here, it's a very different kind of discussion, right? It's like how do we empower people in order to be able to take advantage of these exciting but often inaccessible or expensive or biased technologies, and I think seeing sort of a different way of thinking about what AI could do or and what it shouldn't do and what it should do from these different contexts are really refreshing and an important reminder.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 19:44
Grant Otsuki, associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo, reflected on his experience in discussing the different perspectives his colleagues had, as well as how it changed his own approach to artificial intelligence.

Grant Otsuki 19:58
I think being here makes me more excited to become sort of or try my hand at making something, right? I made a suggestion in that last session about like what would an LLM trained on our discussions be like? Like, would it be any better than what we have, and what would it tell us that maybe we didn't realize exactly about ourselves? I think that would be very interesting, and it sounds, you know, I'm going to go back and ask people about this later. But it's not as technically difficult as you might think. You know, the realization that it's something that you could do, which goes against this sort of like huge, you know, it has to be Meta or it has to be Google or it has to be OpenAI that you rely on to do these things for you, I think, is one takeaway. The other thing is that that there's an opportunity not just to critique systems from the outside, which is sort of the standpoint that social scientists often take, but to try to make something better that could stand alongside or be an alternative that people can maybe you know interact with. This is very exciting, and it's a very different kind of output of research and a very different you know method of research than I would have taken otherwise as an anthropologist.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:14
Mandy Tröger, associate professor of Media and Communication Studies and a Wallenberg Academy fellow at Södertörn University, also found that the space created by the Human Futures Initiative allowed for more creative conversations than what she had previously experienced.

Mandy Tröger 21:32
I really have never been at a place like this. It's very unique to have people from very different backgrounds talking about one subject matter from their very specific viewpoints and theories and language they use, and then also coming from different countries and continents. So I think there's just there's a lot of awareness of people here to really speak in a way that other people who are not part of your field understand what you're trying to say, but then also an awareness that there is different academic cultures, and you know to be respectful of that, I think is working really well here. And what I'm taking away is how fruitful that can be. Talking to a computer engineer or talking to a linguist about you know how they think about AI to me is just really fascinating because it challenges my own understandings and oftentimes the things that for me are just of course they are the way they are and then talking to them I realize oh no wait a minute maybe I need to think about information differently or I need to think about data differently because they do, and so that is to me is very unique about this specific workshop here.

Natalie von der Lehr 22:47
So you were born in East Germany, right?

Mandy Tröger 22:50
Yes. So I was born in not just in East Germany, but I was born in East Berlin, and I was born before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I grew up in East Berlin.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:00
How has that influenced your thinking on AI and all this technology that we are now seeing?

Mandy Tröger 23:06
I did my PhD kind of looking at the transition of media after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So, like that really has become my expertise, and now from there I moved into looking at communication infrastructures. So in that sense, it relates. Then being East German, but also being German generally, I think a lot about the technologies and who is driving and producing these technologies, and with what inherent bias. So like right now, we have you know these big tech companies, mainly in the U.S. that are using our data, and there's like certain logics in them, and also the close connection between these big tech guys and the, for instance, the Trump administration. Being German and East German, I cannot help but you know look at fascist tendencies and authoritarianism, and kind of drawing parallels to what I partly experienced myself, but then also being German and having you know learned a lot about Nazi Germany, to really think about okay, how is this different, but how is it similar also? And I do think having that biographical background really makes me potentially more prone to really look at that and look at that critically, and then also think about what is my role as a researcher and as an academic in that current moment of time.

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 24:38
After all, this is what Institutes for Advanced Studies are there for. Entangling and discussing complex matters from many different angles, open discussions leading to more questions, but importantly, creative ways to tackle them. And then, of course, most academics use AI in their own work. Let's listen to a few of them. We first talked to Eric Cullhed, a professor in Greek at Uppsala University.

Eric Cullhed 25:02
I develop tools that have components that we would definitely call AI for philological purposes. So what I've done, I've been working with training generative language models. So models that are produced, they are neural networks, really, that sort of predict the next token in a conversation, and what you do is that you give them, for instance, a papyrus written in ancient Greek. There is a gap here, and we train them to fill in that gap, and then we evaluate how good they are at that. So that is one kind of application that I've been working with. Another one, very recently, that I'm working a lot with is finding connections between texts. So, together with PhD students in a research school that I'm heading, we are building a system that finds all quotations from ancient Greek and Latin texts in modern Swedish texts. So, we're working with connections between texts, and then you can't really just look at what words are reused, but you have to look at what meanings are reused, and then you need representations of these languages on a higher level that will represent Latin sentences that are similar to Swedish sentences in a similar kind of way, and then you need to use neural networks or these kinds of pre-trained models that know how to encode meaning and represent meaning similarly, even though they are written in different languages.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:30
Next, we talk to a couple of scholars on their thoughts about the usage of AI in academia. Didim Gürdür Broo, an associate professor in the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University shared her perspective as a roboticist.

Didem Gürdür Broo 26:46
What was the question that the artificial intelligence was the answer? I'm very much interested on understanding that. What were we asking? What did we decide that this is a big problem. We need to solve this, and if we solve this, it will create some good. And I am even happy with the general selling thing for the AI. We will optimize things. Even if that is not true. And I can see this very easily, and I see it every day. I am a computer scientist. I eat, drink, socialize, go to biggest conferences in computer science and robotics. These people are the people who built AI for years, and we know it. Can it do some things? Yes. Can it do it good in some extent? But there is a trade-off, and the the question that what was our main aim with this and created it and using it is. So I am really interested with this mismatch. My main concern is around this idea that like we need to understand what is needed in this world and use that as a platform to build products, and you can do exploration for the sake of exploration in many other natural sciences, social sciences, not in engineering. We build things to solve the problems, and I don't see what was the problem, and that is, I think, challenging.

Eliel Camargo-Molina 28:25
I think it's super important to raise that fact that the mismatch is real. You've asked that question several times, and I think it's very relevant. Like for what? And I don't think there is an answer. Then again, as a physicist working on, you know, how particles affected the Big Bang, or just after the Big Bang. I've gotten that question also my whole life. For what?

Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado 28:48
Eliel Camargo-Molina, an astrophysicist working as an associate professor in game design at Uppsala University, had an interesting perspective to share.

Eliel Camargo-Molina 28:57
So, in the same way that you feel some allegiance to your discipline, where engineering is there to solve problems, and it does. It's eventually what solves the problem. So engineering solves problems. I also feel the allegiance to defend the the usefulness of useless stuff. The fact that sometimes it's interesting to just explore for the sake of exploring. You didn't say it's not important, so I'm not saying that. I think we both recognize the importance of the application and solving a problem and of the open exploration. So maybe that, to some extent, also explains the background of our different positions that are not incompatible. So for me, it's just like you know, this is the most fun I've had in a long time, and I don't necessarily feel bound by my discipline to answer what problem am I trying to solve. And I have a maybe you know utopic trust that eventually there will be things that would be very useful. And I know it; it's just a belief. But this is what you do. That's why when you think about the early universe, you trust that whatever thing you do ends up becoming the World Wide Web, which is what happened at CERN, or that you know the mathematical methods or the things that we understand end up contributing to things that many years later become something you can apply and solve problems with, and you cannot do both at the same time. We need people like you. We need people like me.

Natalie von der Lehr 30:24
To round off this first workshop, we went back to the steering committee for their thoughts. In the keynote lecture, Anna Foka addressed the question: What does it mean to be human in these times of artificial intelligence and this whole development. So, what do you think - what does it mean to be a scholar in these times?

Christina Garsten 30:44
Well, I think AI is a complex set of technologies that will have a very big impact on scholarship in the way we read, the way we think, the way we create, write, etcetra. But we have to remember that we are the scholars, and if we continue to reflect together on what this might mean for us, we can also have a much better chance of actually making use of the possibilities of AI in both creative, productive ways that also work towards protecting the integrity of scholarship. So there are challenges; they are big, but there are also big opportunities here. So I think we should remember that this is something that we have been part of creating. We can also be part of steering it and making use of it in a way that actually adds to the value of critical scholarship.

Edward Kirumira 31:52
What it means to be a scholar has increasingly been defined in terms of being competitive. So you must compete. You must be the best in your discipline, and that has taken away the aspect of building communities of scholars. And I think that this gathering brings back the need for creating communities of scholars across context and continents and all these different kinds of things, and begin to look at interdisciplinarity in creation of community of scholars. Which then allows for creativity, which allows for freedom to give and receive, and I think that there are these aspects that we may have to kind of like concretize and say this is what we are offering. So we're not offering a new algorithm, but we are offering a way of doing scholarship, and also to take away the fear that it may not work. Because when you look at these three groups that came together, they didn't know each other. But if somebody walked in yesterday, you'd think they've known each other forever. You really feel you're part of a community, and I think that was amazing in these last two days.

Natalie von der Lehr 33:18
Thank you for listening to this episode and our series SCAS Talks Spotlight, focusing on the first workshop within the research initiative "Human Futures: AI Transitions in a Global Context". In this episode, you have heard more about creating spaces for global interdisciplinary thought collection, and some aspects that were discussed in this first workshop of this research initiative. A big thank you to everybody who has talked to us for the recording of this episode, and also during the coffee breaks and lunches. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also want to check out our regular series featuring the research of present and former scholars at SCAS. SCAS Talks represents the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium, and we are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. SCAS Talks is available on Podbean, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Thank you once again for listening, and bye for now.

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