In recent years, intense debate has emerged surrounding the long-term impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human society. While some envision AI as a catalyst for utopia, others warn of catastrophic consequences. These discourses are often infiltrated by predictions allegedly based on objective data and robust foresight, but they are viewpoints based on specific norms and assumptions and concern a highly uncertain future. Furthermore, these perspectives often oversimplify the complex relationship between technology and society, treating the future as predetermined by technological advancement. The aim of this seminar is to critically analyze the discourse on the long-term future of AI society and reconsider the value of exploring such future visions from a ‘technosocial’ perspective. The technosocial approach that will be advanced during our seminar indicates that discourses on the future of AI society shall not be narrowed to prophecy and prediction but are fueled and shaped by specific norms and assumptions, which need to be unraveled. The goals of our seminar are: (1) Develop a critical analysis of the normative and conceptual assumptions of utopian and dystopian discourses about the future of AI in our societies; (2) Explore the significance of these futuristic discourses aside their aspiration of being objective predictions; (3) Propose technosocial future visions of a human society co-existing with AI systems. This approach to AI futures in hermeneutic spirit is based on the conviction that upholding a sharp distinction between technology and the social is one of the ideological constraints that many AI futures could help us overcome. The organizers seek to build the foundations for long-term cooperation between the two main participating institutions (TU Delft & Hokkaido University). Aside from advancing our main research questions, it is our dedicated goal to build a research group that can be elevated to the status of a Special Interest Group within the Society for Philosophy of Technology (SPT) (https://www.spt.org/sigs/).

Synthetic biology engineers living systems to perform useful functions. For example, we engineer small bacteria's genomes to produce expensive vitamins or to degrade plastic waste. However, cells do not behave the same even when their genetic information is the same. For example, when we engineer cells to produce a specific molecule, some cells produce it efficiently while other cells do not. This is a problem because the overall yield of production is reduced because of inefficient cells. This increase in the production cost is one of the major obstacles that need to be overcome to commercialise many synthetic biology applications. To solve this problem, we need to know what is happening inside each cell. However, it is not an easy task because a cell is a complex object. Even a simple bacterial cell has more than one million molecules inside its cytoplasm. In this proposal, we will develop a simple cell mimic - an artificial cell system made from scratch using synthetic elements - to observe what is happening inside a cell. This will help us to understand why cells show different responses despite sharing the same genetic information. A microfluidic device will be used to produce artificial cells at a scale large enough to analyse different populations. Then we will observe individual cells and their responses. The result will be analysed with mathematical modelling to understand why certain cells behave differently from other cells. This knowledge will allow us to engineer cells that exhibit homogeneous and consistent behaviour. In a long term, this work will help commercialise a lot of synthetic biology applications by reducing their production costs.

One of the most important processes used to decontaminate nuclear waste streams, such as those resulting from cleanup operations at Fukushima, decommissioning at Sellafield, and other nuclear industry operations, is ion exchange. In this process, the radioactive contamination is removed from water by being bound onto (or into) a solid ion exchange material. Once the capacity of these ion exchange materials (which are used in the form of pellets of zeolites or titanates, in the cases of interest in this project) to take up radioactive contamination is filled ('becoming 'spent'), the pellets must somehow be converted into a solid form to ensure that they are stable for storage and final disposal. The cementation of ion exchangers into solid waste forms has been proposed and trialled in a number of locations, and using a variety of types of cements. However, there is not yet a good fundamental understanding of how the ion exchangers and the cements will interact in the long term - and this is the core focus of the proposed project. This information is essential to developing a safety case for the use of cementation for the final treatment and disposal of ion exchange resins; we must be able to predict how the materials will behave in the long term, including knowledge of any possible release of radioactivity in the distant future, to enable this to be minimised or avoided. This project will generate the essential fundamental scientific insight related to the stability of ion exchange materials in cementitious environments, using both traditional and newly-developed bespoke cement types. We will characterise the cements and waste forms to an unprecedented level of precision using sorption, solubility and microstructural measurements. This fundamental knowledge will be used to generate a predictive model for the performance of the waste forms over the full timescale required for final disposal of nuclear wastes, tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This will also enable us to provide recommendations for which types of cements should be used, and in which way they should be applied, to give the best outcomes in keeping radioactive contamination away from the environment in the ultra-long term.