Anticipatory Media

Abstract

Abstract This chapter summarizes the key deliberations in the book and frames the existential issues at stake in the digital limit situation by discussing how in the present age, AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Interrogating how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, the chapter scrutinizes the “inevitability” of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending to how the technology is embedded in broader appropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, by turning to the lessons drawn from the mourners, the coexisters, and by conceiving of anticipatory media as another form of existential media, the chapter offers an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of “the new AI era” of predictive modeling, exploitation, and dataism. It submits that the present moment of technological transformation and of escalating multifaceted and interrelated global crises is a digital limit situation in which there are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatory media. The chapter suggests that attending to them as a “future present,” opening up horizons of “futurability,” and taking responsible action constitute our utmost capability and task. The chapter concludes that precisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing a postdisciplinary, integrative, and generative form of humanities and social sciences as a method of hope that engages AI designers in the pursuit of an inclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability.