What fears and hopes do participants in the seminar "The Invention of the Future: How Do We Want to Live?" associate with the influence and role of AI in the future? These range from anxieties such as world war, climate catastrophe, child-rearing challenges, and weaker emotional bonds to hopes such as positive technological developments through AI, advances in medicine or justice, improved understanding of human nature, and peace. From December 9th to 13th, 2024, participants in the early childhood education program at the Anna Freud School explored the risks and potential of artificial intelligence, considering both dystopian and utopian scenarios and questioning their own options for action – today and tomorrow.
A "Portalcycle" that transforms a bicycle into a backpack and vice versa, a "Freedom Ball" that helps to structure and fairly make decisions, or "Memorytravel" that allows you to virtually travel to places of memory? These are just some of the objects of the future that participants envisioned at the beginning of the seminar. The collaborative exploration of the future began with an introduction to concepts such as utopia, dystopia, and dystopia, as well as creative experimentation with image-generating tools, including AI, and ideas for tomorrow's products.
"When we think about the future, which values are important to you today and will remain important – for you personally and for society?"Respondents mentioned values such as freedom of expression, honesty, courtesy, justice, freedom, helpfulness, faith, charity, appreciation, empathy, willingness to compromise, open-mindedness, consideration, respect, and more.
In all workshops, the exchange of individual approaches to the group's respective focus area formed the starting point for developing shared content-related questions and research. Depending on the medium, project ideas were developed, tested, and implemented in connection with these content-related discussions.
The resulting products and their presentations – from the photography exhibition, the film screening, the game testing to the podcast – are the results of diverse research and discussion processes, which partly reflect/document these processes.
- Film: “Humanity 2.0”, contains AI-created film scenes, content: a look back from the year 2050, after it has been possible to make society more humane again and to reprogram AI positively in the sense of humanity.
- Analog black and white photography: Photography series “On equal terms with AI”, “Will nature still triumph in the future?”, “Humanity in the shadow of AI”, “Utopia – A glimpse into the future”, “Composite future” partly published: photographed exhibition/photo series as pdf
- Analog game development: Card games
- “Mystery Prompt”: Terms such as democracy, discrimination, respect, justice, loneliness, etc., must be guessed by players from AI-generated images.
- “Auroras Legacy”: among other things, missions must be completed, such as collecting cards with symbols like peace doves, peace signs, robots, fists of justice, and globes.
- Podcast: Topic "To what extent does the progress of AI influence the personality development of humanity?" (with AI-generated audio scenes/interview), 30 min including cover image and accompanying text with source references
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Further information
Some of the results are published at
https://padlet.com/Bildung/digital_living
Impressions from the seminar on Flickr
The seminar was a collaboration with the Anna Freud School in Berlin.
It was funded by the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family.
The wannseeFORUM Foundation is a recognized sponsor of the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
