Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future

Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future invites us to think forward from our present moment of planetary, public and everyday crisis, through the prism of emerging technologies.

It calls for a new ethical, responsible and equitable path towards possible futures, curated through in-depth engagement with and across experiential, environmental and technological possibilities. It tackles three of the most significant challenges for contemporary society by asking: how emerging technologies are implicated in the sites of everyday lives; what place emerging technologies have in an evolving world in crisis; and how we might better imagine and shape ethical, equitable and responsible futures. The book interweaves three narratives, each of which advances three sets of concerns for our societal futures: ‘Emergence’, which addresses futures, trust and hope; ‘Worlds’, which addresses data, air and energy; and ‘Technologies’, which addresses the future of mobilities, homes and work.

Not simply a critical study of emerging technologies, this book is also an approach to thinking and practice in times of global crisis that plays out a mode of future-focused scholarship and action for the first half of the twenty-first century.

Sarah Pink is a design anthropologist, documentary filmmaker and methods innovator. She is a professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, and an investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.