The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), put forward a two-year international research program called Human Futures – AI Transitions in a Global Context. The program is supported by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASPHS), and it is executed in collaboration with its partners Tokyo College and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS).
Dr Itai Makone from the Policy Innovation Lab was invited to participate in the Human Futures international research program, alongside other scholars from the Nordics, Asia and Africa.
The inaugural workshop was held from 27 to 29 May 2026, in Uppsala, Sweden. It aimed to advance scholarly debate, explore and shape the human, societal and global implications of AI transitions sustained through interdisciplinary and cross-regional dialogue. Additionally, the workshop sought to build capacity to understand and govern the use of AI, for the benefit of future humans.
The workshop was kick-started by a keynote public Lecture by Prof. Anna Foka (Uppsala University), who presented on “Human Futures, Machine Pasts.”  She interrogated what it means to be human in an age of AI. As a human, the ideas to ponder on are that selection is power, who decides which people get digitised, and humans have the right to be forgotten. She emphasised that AI is not a force of nature, but a cultural artefact shaped by inherited history, culture, biases and epistemologies. In closing, Prof Foka highlighted the need for interdisciplinary approaches that foreground ethics, creativity and global diversity and urged that AI should be a shared space of interpretation and reflection.
Each participant introduced themselves with an object that represented AI. Dr Makone selected a candle to represent fire. With the proper parameters, fire is beneficial; it provides warmth, preserves, and cooks food. Similarly, the benefits from AI are tremendous, but the same fire can cause a wildfire, destroy buildings and cause devastating harm. The risks of AI need to be mitigated to enjoy the efficiencies that it produces. Other objects included an old text that was used for interpretation, irregular dice, an old Apple phone, and fieldwork notes from an interview at a technology company. The objects reflected on the authenticity of humans.
The workshop focused on how AI transforms the production of knowledge and research practices, as well as how it is experienced within academia, raising questions of agency, autonomy and institutional change. The discussions, working groups and exercises revealed differing perspectives, raising key questions, challenges and tensions to discuss going forward. Consensus was not the goal, but rather exploring how the questions connect, collide, diverge or become entangled, shaping the direction of the next Human Futures workshop at STIAS in March 2027 and subsequently Tokyo in November 2027.
Rather than converging on a single framework, the workshop participants reflected on the value of different ways of framing, understanding, and living with AI and on the recognition that all of us, regardless of discipline or expertise, still have much to learn. The workshop ended with various action points regarding research collaborations and projects, building up to the next workshop.
Reflecting on the workshop, Dr Itai Makone said, “This workshop was a great opportunity for me to listen with the intention to understand and engage with different disciplines and regions, while also exploring AI’s tensions and challenges and find a collaborative way forward.”
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