Automation and Futures: Doing Social Science Forward

In this chapter I interrogate the possibility of automated futures, to argue instead for a focus on how automated features assist people in everyday life situations in the present and possible futures. Underpinning this approach is a theory of futures as contingent and emergent, and of the everyday as a generative site of creativity and improvisation. Methodologically it requires us to seek out the experiential and values based nature of possible everyday futures, and to consider how in these futures people, the environmental circumstances in which they find themselves and the ways of knowing and learning they employ, will shape the possibilities and roles played by automated technologies and systems. In doing so I will introduce the possibility of doing social science forward, and I will draw on ethnographic and documentary filmmaking materials and encounters derived from projects focused on emerging technologies, energy and future everyday life in the home and future automated mobilities.