Predictions Without Futures

Repetition and stagnation in dreams of artificial intelligence

Sun-ha Hong

Date: July 2, 2026 (Thursday) 

Time: 17:30-19:00 

Venue: 2-508, 5F, Building 2, Sophia University 

Format: In-person only / No prior registration necessary

The technological future bears down on us today with a suffocating universality, described already by Bertolt Brecht in 1939: “I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New.” Futures sketched boldly on powerpoint slides, by the same few Stanford boys, through which billions of dollars churn only to recycle social visions of generations past.

Through this process, novel technical paradigms often rehabilitate far older, moribund fantasies, from frictionless automation to instantaneous communication.

This history of futures and their repetitions can help us understand AI without becoming sucked into AI discourse, and its unproductive fantasies around killer robots or posthuman utopias. I focus on one particular form of cultural repetition: the vision of the automatic home and kitchen, from robot vacuum cleaners in fin-de-siècle Paris, to Cold War exhibitions, to 21st century smart devices - and the models of family, labour, and society embedded into those technological futures.

Sun-ha Hong examines forms of uncertainty, doubt, myth, and (dis)belief around AI and data-driven technologies. He is associate professor in the Department of Communication and the School of Data Science and Society at UNC-Chapel Hill, with prior roles at Stanford, Simon Fraser University, and MIT. He is the author of Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society (NYU Press, 2020), and Predictions Without Futures: Repetition and Stagnation in Dreams of Artificial Intelligence (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

This talk is organized by Dodom Kim (Assistant Professor, Sophia University).