Need
The Need for Alternative Futures
There is a need to design differently.
Giaccardi, Elisa, and Johan Redström. ‘Technology and More-Than-Human Design’. Design Issues 36, no. 4 (2020): 33–44. https://doi.org/10/gh6rvm.
Romani, Alessia, Francesca Casnati, and Alessandro Ianniello. ‘Codesign with More-Than-Humans: Toward a Meta Co-Design Tool for Human-Non-Human Collaborations’. European Journal of Futures Research 10, no. 1 (2022): 17. https://doi.org/10/gqvdsm.
Risks
See Risk
The Need to Evaluate Long-Term Risks
Future holds the potential for a greater amount of harm and suffering.
Existential Risks
Also called global catastrophic risks. Here, "existential" typically applies to humans.
- Global justice is an existential risk but the commonly listed drivers are corruption and structural discrimination in application to humans. How can this include nonhuman beings?
- Extreme technological risks.
- Risks from AI as a separate category.
- Global environment at risk.
- Biology and biotechnology, such as pandemics, etc.
The Impact of Technology
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Mohamed, Shakir, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac. ‘Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence’. Philosophy & Technology 33, no. 4 (2020): 659–84. https://doi.org/10/gg64rt.
Powell, Alison B. Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Human Response to Risk
Schubert, Stefan, Lucius Caviola, and Nadira S. Faber. ‘The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction’. Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 15100. https://doi.org/10/ggs95r.
Decision-Making in Uncertainty or in Adversarial Contexts
MacAskill, William, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord. Moral Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
On the historical background of "existential risk studies": Ripples on the Great Sea of Life: A Brief History of Existential Risk Studies
An example on prioritising reserach, this is from legal studies. Useful as an example of how decision-making, design, accountability all could be assessed from priorities before setting on more-than-human justice. Legal Priorities Research: A Research Agenda
Bostrom, Nick. ‘Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards’. Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (2002).
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Bostrom, Nick, and Milan M. Ćirković, eds. Global Catastrophic Risks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Bostrom, Nick. ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’. Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 455–76. https://doi.org/10/gf9gj8.
Albert, Michael J. ‘The Dangers of Decoupling: Earth System Crisis and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”’. Global Policy 11, no. 2 (2020): 245–54. https://doi.org/10/gqxqq3.
Manheim, David. ‘The Fragile World Hypothesis: Complexity, Fragility, and Systemic Existential Risk’. Futures 122 (2020): 102570. https://doi.org/10/gjjkcn.
Holt, Lauren Adele. ‘Why Shouldn’t We Cut the Human-Biosphere Umbilical Cord?’ Futures 133 (2021): 102821. https://doi.org/10/gqxqrb.
Organisations
Unsustainability of Digital Communication
- resource-intensive
- vulnerable to damage
- resource-limited
- depends on continuous energy supply
Kuntsman, Adi, and Imogen Rattle. ‘Towards a Paradigmatic Shift in Sustainability Studies: A Systematic Review of Peer Reviewed Literature and Future Agenda Setting to Consider Environmental (Un)Sustainability of Digital Communication’. Environmental Communication 13, no. 5 (2019): 567–81. https://doi.org/10/gnkxhf.
Kuntsman, Adi. ‘From Digital Solutionism to Materialist Accountability: The Urgency of New Interventions’. Journal of Environmental Media 1, no. 1 (2020): 15–19. https://doi.org/10/grnwns.
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