Aarathi Krishnan - "Grey Mirror – is uncertainty about the future an opportunity for greater equality?" (11 October 2022, CSER Public Lecture, University of Cambridge)
The future is a grey mirror of our present. Uncertainty about what happens next means the future is never available in high definition. This makes it important to consider a wide range of potential futures in case any of them come true. But that’s not as fun as sitting back and enjoying the vivid future painted by a Black Mirror episode on TV. What does it mean to intentionally make futures that don’t just come from a few people’s imaginations? How can more inclusive activities about the future lead to fairer decisions in the present? What are the risks this poses, what fault lines might it open up, if this isn’t taken into consideration?
Aarathi Krishnan is the Senior Advisor for Strategic Foresight at the UN Development Programme. She works at the intersections of applied foresight and anticipatory systems. She is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as well as a technology and human rights fellow at Harvard's Carr Center for Technology and Human Rights, where she works on foresight and decolonial technology ethics in humanitarian technology governance.
Speakers
- Jess Bland (Chair) - Deputy Director, CSER
- Aarathi Krishnan - Senior Advisor for Strategic Foresight at the UN Development Programme
- Professor Genevieve Liveley - Professor of Classics and Turing Fellow at the University of Bristol
- Ben Yeoh - Playwright and global equities investor
- Ella Saltmarshe - Co-founder of The Long Time Project
