Anticipatory Knowledge Research Articles

Intuition as a “trained thing”: sensing, thinking, and speculating in computational cultures

What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic? This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically, and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive, computational and corporate processes and (infra)structures that characterise algorithmic life. Bringing affect theory and speculative philosophies to bear on computational histories and cultures, I tease out the continuing implications of post-war efforts to make intuition a measurable and indexable mode of anticipatory knowledge. If digital computing pioneers tended to elide the more ambivalent implications of quantifying intuition, this article asks what computational myths are at play in current accounts of machine learning-enabled sensing, thinking, and speculating and what complexities or chaos are disavowed. I argue that an understanding of more-than-human intuition which grapples meaningfully with the indeterminacy central to digitally mediated social life must recognise that visceral response is recursively trained in multiple ways with diverse, and often contradictory, effects.

Modern interpretation of the category “prognostic competence” in the interdisciplinary dimension

The article highlights the problem of forming the prognostic competence of a modern teacher as an integral element of his/her professional competence. The generalization of the study results fixed in scientific literature on the initiated problem made it possible to specify the concept “prediction” (a scientifically substantiated statement about the possible states of the object or alternative ways and terms of their implementation; the result of prognostic activity, anticipatory knowledge, hypothesis, a set of information obtained as a result of the use of human abilities to anticipation, prediction based on intuition and scientific understanding of patterns which are applied to events and phenomena both in the past, present and future time). It was established that the prognostic competence of the teacher is a synthetic, multi-determined personal and professional construct that determines the teacher's ability to coordinate the goal and result of professional and pedagogical activities (pedagogical forecast); to determine the directions of pedagogical activity according to the proposed hypotheses; to enrich the palette of professional functions with pedagogical predicting. It has been proven that the prognostic competence allows the teacher to construct individual educational trajectories of students and predict likely changes in the field of education using the potential of pedagogical prognostication; reflects the teacher's own desire for professional self-determination and personal development of others by means of didactics. The structure of the prognostic competence of a modern teacher is described in the unity of cognitive-informational, intellectual-mental, instrumental-technological and worldview-related professional components. The cognitive-informational component of the prognostic competence provides a theoretical “foundation” that reflects the systematicity, orderliness, and complexity of education seekers’ knowledge regarding the methodology of prognostication, the phasing of prognostic activity, the vectors of pedagogical predicting (forecasting) within the system of professional and pedagogical activities. The intellectual-mental component of the prognostic competence of a Mathematics teacher reflects his/her innate cognitive intentions, the level, rhythm and pace of assimilation of information, ability-related opportunities in the use of higher-order cognitions, mental activity, flexibility of thinking and its variability. The instrumental and technological component of the teacher's prognostic competence records the practical possibilities of the teacher to implement the cognitive-informational profile of pedagogical prognostication in the educational space. It reflects a complex of skills that ensure the effective implementation of the elements of pedagogical forecasting in the system of professional and pedagogical activities. The worldview-related professional component of the teacher’s prognostic competence expresses the teacher’s stable professional position regarding the use of the potential of pedagogical prognostication in the system of specific pedagogical activity. It reflects innate pedagogical abilities that allow a teacher to correctly and creatively use the skills of pedagogical forecasting to build students’ individual educational trajectories at an intuitive level.

Contextual social valences for artificial intelligence: anticipation that matters in social work

ABSTRACT In pilot trials, Finnish caseworkers in child welfare services used an AI tool predicting severe risks faced by their clients. Based on interviews with the caseworkers involved, this article draws on those trials to discuss AI valences, or the range of expectations of AI’s value and performance, in social work and beyond. While AI travels across sites of application and sectors of society, its value is often expected to come from the production of anticipatory knowledge. The predictive AI tool used by Finnish caseworkers offers an example: it turned past data about clients into predictions about their future, with an aim of authorizing present interventions to optimize the future. In the pilot trials, however, AI met the practice of social work. In contrast to generic expectations of predictive performance, caseworkers had contextual expectations for AI, reflecting their situated knowledge about their field. For caseworkers, anticipation does not mean producing pieces of speculative knowledge about the future. Instead, for them, anticipation is a professional knowledge-making practice, based on intimate encounters with clients. Caseworkers therefore expect AI to produce contextually relevant information that can facilitate those interactions. This suggests that for AI developments to matter in social work, it is necessary to consider AI not as a tool that produces knowledge outcomes, but one that supports human experts’ knowledge-making processes. More broadly, as AI tools enter new sensitive areas of application, instead of expecting generic value and performance from them, careful attention should be paid on contextual AI valences.

Governing the rural futures: Anxiety machine, anticipatory actions and rural affective politics

Regional revitalisation ideas are widely regarded as cures for socio-economic problems in rural areas in developed countries. Instead of relying on exogenous resources, the concept seeks to revalorise rural communities through cultural resources and self-responsibility. Such an approach to rural development has gained rapid popularity across East Asian regions over the past decade. Rather than merely focusing on the movement of people and ideas, a growing body of literature on policy mobility directs more attention to the power relations of the movement. However, less attention has been paid to how rural futures are anticipated and acted upon and how policies that have implemented specific futures elsewhere are justified. To address these theoretical gaps, this paper draws on the work of future geographies and develops the idea of the anxiety machine. I suggest that the study of policy mobility must seriously consider how rural futures are imagined and governed, and what rural affective politics emerged from the enactment of particular futures. With reference to a case study of rural revitalisation policy learning in Taiwan and Japan, this paper suggests that an emphasis on the circulation of global anticipatory knowledge advances the understanding of the geographies of rural policy-making.

Imagining futures within the constraints of the present. The coproduction of anticipatory knowledge in an energy scenarios platform in Argentina

ABSTRACT In this article, we study the coproduction of anticipatory knowledge and its political sensemaking during a set of participatory scenarios-building exercises. Based on interviews with organizers and participants, and analysis of reports produced by an energy scenarios platform in Argentina (the Plataforma Escenarios Energéticos), our investigation shows that the scenarios produced, as well as the calculations and models on which they are based, build anticipatory knowledge that denies contingency and translates the vision of the future of the energy sector of each scenarist into a straight and well-drawn path. Bringing these scenarios together in a single exercise that legitimizes and builds consensus through the participatory process and the use of technical expertise is a way of locking in the future – that is, a way of ensuring that the future can be known and controlled, setting aside other possible futures. In this sense, the objective of the scenario-building exercise is to simplify the complex process of transforming the energy matrix into predictable trajectories, thus convincing investors and the public administration.

Sensing weather: scientific and experiential modes of knowledge production for small-scale farming in western Kenya

Abstract. Agriculture depends in large part on relations with weather phenomena, such as rain and temperature. Anticipatory knowledge about the atmosphere therefore is vital in agricultural livelihoods. Based on an ethnographic case study of weather forecasting for small-scale farming in western Kenya, in this paper I discuss different ways in which knowledge about the future weather is produced. While development organizations promote expert forecasts that draw on meteorological sensing technologies as a solution to dealing with climate change, I show how knowing the weather is an entangled affair in a sensory assemblage that simultaneously draws on scientific instruments and on other entities such as animals, plants, clouds and embodied sensoria associated with experiential knowledge. Building on concepts related to science and technology studies that address the relations between humans and nonhumans, I suggest to treat scientific and experiential devices symmetrically by looking at their more-than-human sensoria, proxies and imaginations to understand how farmers attune to the weather. In practice, then, navigating the uncertainties of the weather is not enabled by scientific meteorology alone, but by combining different sensory devices and practices of interpretation that together mediate the weather as something to be known and acted upon.

Ignorance and Change: Anticipatory Knowledge and the European Refugee Crisis. By A. Mica, A. Horolets, M. Pawlak and P. Kubicki. Routledge, 2020, 270 pp.

book review

Examining Pandemic Futurity

‘The future’ is difficult to define. As with ‘time’ more generally, it has twin social and ontological connotations. This essay considers what Adam and Groves (2007) call “the present future” and “the future present”. The former being “process-based perspectives on futurity” like anticipatory knowledge practices and the latter being “the future as both an effecting process and/or as living” (Adam and Groves, 2007: 176). Covid-19 reinforces the necessity for the futures we envisage and enact in the twenty-first century to diverge from anthropocentrism towards an ethics of care whilst simultaneously acknowledging structural impediments to environmental, economic, and epidemiological justice. This article reaches these considerations in two ways. The first examines how the pandemic has transformed lived relationships with the future. The second links these relationships with the future to broader political temporalities including future-oriented governance. It is worth noting further here that these reflections are oriented predominantly towards the experience of the pandemic in the United Kingdom, given the extent to which they derive from my own experience. I believe, however, that they give rise to ideas and themes relevant in diverse historico-geographical contexts.

Using animal history to inform current debates in gene editing farm animals: A systematic review

There is growing interest in gene editing farm animals. Some alterations could benefit animal welfare (e.g., improved heat tolerance in cattle with the “slick” gene), the environment (e.g., reducing methane emissions from cattle with induced pluripotent stem cells), and productivity (e.g., higher weight gains in cattle with the “double muscling” gene). Existing scholarship on the acceptability of such modifications has used myriad approaches to identify societal factors that shape the ethics and governance of this technology. We argue that integrating historical approaches—particularly from the relatively new and burgeoning field of animal history—offers a form of “anticipatory knowledge” that can help guide discussions on this topic. We conducted a systematic review of the animal history literature in English, German, and Spanish to identify the influence of political, scientific, economic, social, and cultural factors on the development and acceptance of such technologies. We identified analogous structures and fault lines in past debates about farm animals that provide insights for contemporary discussions about gene editing. Those analogous structures include the market power of meatpackers or the racialized precepts in livestock breeding, and fault lines, like the disconnect between states and citizens over the direction of food systems. Highlighting these similarities demonstrates how external forces have shaped—and will continue to shape—the acceptance or rejection of emerging biotechnologies as applied to farm animals.

Rumours as Anticipatory Knowledge in a Future Petro-State

Building on ethnographic research in Uganda, this paper discusses the mundane practice of rumour mongering and gossiping as anticipatory practices. Crude oil discovery in Uganda brought a small oil boom to the region endowed with the natural resource including some infrastructure development and the presence of foreign oil exploration and construction companies. With these companies came (young) men working for them or aspiring to get employed. However, as the development of the oil remained in a phase not-yet-ness, a temporal space opened for rumours about the oil and anyone involved with it to flourish in the oil region. Especially, since information on the (national) development of the oil project was scarce. The rumours used familiar tropes such as gender stereotypes or witchcraft to relate to the presence of foreign or at least non-local casual workers. Ugandans living in the oil region wondered what negative repercussions the boom might have for them and viewed the strangers with suspicion. During my fieldwork, I encountered rumours of wife-snatching, sexual harassment and even human sacrifice. This paper argues that these rumours can be understood as risks narratives or the sharing of anticipatory knowledge. The rumours were not only reflections of the past but were told in anticipation of the dark side of the future.

Societal factors affecting on innovative sustainable development of nanotechnology: a morphological approach

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the probable future scenarios of nanotechnology development and their implications in Iran considering anticipatory knowledge, suitable methodology and integral perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe study used framework morphology, a method for creating scenarios and their implications developed by the Delphi method that covers the consistent morphological space and make contact with previous scenario work, as well as the current and projected research and policy situation in Iran.FindingsThe study identified five scenarios, namely, “no nano” scenario headlines picturing a future society that there is no impact of nanotechnology in it. The “nano flow” scenario and indicates prospering nanotechnology in the full sides of the market. The “no nano contact” scenario suspecting that apart from the already banned nanotechnological applications in food, cosmetics, clothes and agricultural applications might bear equally unacceptable risks. The “hidden nano” scenario by pointing out the effects of accidents and crimes traced back to intended or unintended misuse of nanotechnological applications. Then finally, the “red nano” scenario illustration headlines the prospects of medical, energy system efficiency and nanotechnological applications in information and communication technologies.Practical implicationsThe policymakers could use the scenarios and their implications as part of its considerations in strategic planning.Originality/valueThis paper represents the first time that a framework for societal implications has been applied to nanotechnology development topic in Iran.

Applying foresight to policy agenda-setting: A successful case in South Korea

There is still a persistent gap between ‘knowing’ the future and implementing it in policymaking. South Korea implemented a project in 2019 to proactively manage future conflicts. The project was initiated to provide foresight-policymaking integration by elevating future conflict issues to ongoing government institutional agendas. Utilizing an exploratory, single-project case based on a field-study method, this article presents observations of the project’s applied approaches in foresight-policy integration along with corresponding implications. The project integrated agenda-setting strategies such as actor-based strategies (inside-access, mobilization, and outside-initiation models), an issue-attention strategy, and packaging strategies (analogous to previous agendas and the utilization of symbols), as well as two-way translation methods of foresight (forecasting and backcasting). There are two underlying reasons for this integration being successful, namely the nature of agenda-setting being conducive to foresight processes and the project’s key design variables (forward-looking leadership and the designated group’s active representation of future generations). A future conflict agenda-setting project can serve as a great entry point through which to increase the anticipatory knowledge and capacity of the actors involved. To internalize these, however, new anticipatory knowledge- and capacity-based governance should be introduced through the continued training and education of both government officials and the public.

Towards an anticipatory public engagement methodology: deliberative experiments in the assembly of possible worlds using focus groups

Against the background of critique in public engagement scholarship on new and emerging science and innovation, this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making anticipatory knowledge. Adopting a science and technology studies perspective, a public engagement methodology is presented aimed at anticipating the kinds of possible and plausible worlds that novel science and technology bring into being. Drawing on six empirical social science research projects using focus groups, design criteria are explicated on context, framing, moderation, sampling, analysis and interpretation. A feature of the methodology lies in the assembly of emergent collectives and identities that are constituted to negotiate endogenously public meanings, concerns and priorities. I reflect on the potential of such processes to reconfigure dominant policy narratives, the role of the social scientist in mediating such processes and the politics of making anticipatory knowledge.

The co-production of sustainable future scenarios

Scenarios are a tool to develop plausible, coherent visions about the future and to foster anticipatory knowledge. We present the Sustainable Future Scenarios (SFS) framework and demonstrate its application through the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) urban site. The SFS approach emphasizes the co-development of positive and long-term alternative future visions. Through a collaboration of practitioner and academic stakeholders, this research integrates participatory scenario development, modeling, and qualitative scenario assessments. The SFS engagement process creates space to question the limits of what is normally considered possible, desirable, or inevitable in the face of future challenges. Comparative analyses among the future scenarios demonstrate trade-offs among regional and microscale temperature, water use, land-use change, and co-developed resilience and sustainability indices. SFS incorporate diverse perspectives in co-producing positive future visions, thereby expanding traditional future projections. The iterative, interactive process also creates opportunities to bridge science and policy by building anticipatory and systems-based decision-making and research capacity for long-term sustainability planning.

The Politics of Anticipatory Expertise: Plurality and Contestation of Futures Knowledge in Governance — Introduction to the Special Issue

Anticipatory expertise has become an indispensable core ingredient of contemporary attempts to govern complex problem. It has also become a field of contention, wherein a variety of technologies of knowledge production, social groups, and visions of the future coexist and compete. Indeed, the production of predictions and forecasts for public policy is not only an epistemic endeavour, but also an intrinsically contested and political activity. The special issue builds on ongoing scholarly discussions about anticipatory knowledge and its ‘performativity’ on policy and governance, to take a fresh look at the politics of anticipatory expertise.

Pre-crime and Policing of Migrants: Anticipatory Action Meets Management of Concerns

In 2015 the Norwegian police initiated its first national intelligence project—Operation Migrant. One central aim was to predict crime challenges related to increased migration to improve future resource allocation. Based on qualitative interviews with those managing the operation, this article foregrounds the question of how attempts to reduce uncertainties and manage what is perceived as migration-related threats and risks, shape not only ideas of risk in policing of migration but also influence the importance of precautionary logic in regular policing. First, we analyse how knowledge production built on risk management and sharing of risk intelligence products are co-produced by intelligence staff and decision-makers. Thereafter, we discuss paradoxical outcomes of a calculated and precautionary logic applied to policing migrants. Concretely, the article focuses on how anticipatory knowledge practices seem to enlarge the space for probabilities, making it even more complex and contested to reduce and control uncertainty.

After Work: Anticipatory Knowledge on Post-Scarcity Futures in John Barness Thousand Cultures Tetralogy

What would happen if we could create societies with an abundance of goods and services created by cutting-edge technology, making manual wage labour unnecessary – what has been labelled societies with a post-scarcity economy. What are the pros and cons of such a future? Several science fiction novels and films have discussed these questions in recent decades, and have examined them in the socio-political, cultural, economic, scientific and environmental contexts of globalization, migration, nationalism, automation, robotization, the development of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and global warming. In the first section of this article, I introduce methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives connected to Critical Future Studies and science fiction as anticipatory knowledge. In the second and third section, I introduce the question of the value of work by discussing some examples from speculative fiction. In section four to seven, I analyze the Thousand Culture tetralogy (1992–2006), written by science fiction author John Barnes. The Thousand Cultures tetralogy is set in the 29th century, in a post-scarcity world. It highlights the question of work and leisure, and the values of each, and discusses these through the various societies depicted in the novels. What are the possible risks with societies where work is voluntary?

Eclectic, random, intuitive? Technology assessment, RRI, and their use of history

ABSTRACTTechnology assessment (TA) allows deliberate and anticipatory governance of sociotechnical transformation processes. Which bodies of knowledge TA practitioners typically use for their work has been discussed for some time now. Relatively little attention has been paid so far to the use of historical knowledge in TA. This might be even more astonishing as the knowledge about futures that TA provides is substantially based on analyzing and abstracting past developments, discovering similarities to current processes and finally drawing conclusions therefrom about possible futures. Typically, producers of anticipatory knowledge randomly employ an intuitive handling of the historicity of their subject matter; when it comes to the selection of literature they proceed eclectic. In this paper, we describe which kinds of historical representation appear in TA and responsible research and innovation (RRI) practitioners’ line of vision and how historical knowledge could be used to assess enactor–selector games. With this conceptual contribution to the ongoing debate of orientation for TA and RRI, we call for a more deliberated treatment of ‘historical knowledge’ in both fields.

Effects of Vocabulary Size on Anticipatory Sentence Processing in Korean Learners of English

The present study investigates whether and the extent to which nonnative speakers of English exhibit anticipatory processing of English sentences in comparison to native speakers (Borovsky et al., 2012), using a looking-while-listening paradigm. We also examine the relationship between the anticipatory behavior and vocabulary knowledge of English as a second language. College students with high-intermediate English proficiency participated in an eye-tracking experiment and an offline measurement of vocabulary knowledge. The results revealed that the participants anticipate upcoming words, thereby incrementally processing English sentences as native speakers do. In doing so, they also actively make use of combinatory information of semantic cues and real-world knowledge, having advantage of a larger L2 vocabulary size.

You Learn by your Mistakes. Effective Training Strategies Based on the Analysis of Video-Recorded Worked-out Examples

This paper presents an empirical study on procedural learning from errors that was conducted within the field of vocational education. It examines whether, and to what extent, procedural learning can benefit more from the detection and written analysis of errors (experimental condition) than from the correct elements (control group). The study involved 136 commercial employee apprentices who were working on a videorecorded, worked-out example of a professional procedure involving customer counselling. The results showed no differences between the conditions with regards to declarative knowledge acquisition during the procedure. Additionally, the analysis of errors was demonstrated to be more effective than the analysis of correct behaviours in terms of (1) representing a much more detailed and correct procedure and (2) developing anticipatory knowledge about possible errors to be avoided. The results highlighted the value of the inductive instructional strategy (from the analysis of a single worked-out example to the learning of the general procedure) and opened the field up for future applications of a similar instructional approach combining roleplaying and video analysis of errors in vocational education to develop communication skills.