We're a foresight company.
We identify future market opportunities and challenges in digital and virtual domains through research, analysis, and exploratory fiction.
We make sense of tomorrow, today.
Our work considers the challenges and opportunities that will emerge when new technology transforms society. We explore the space where the real and virtual environments converge.
Opportunity
The Virtual Economy - An exploratory deepdive
The Virtual Economy is a system of sophisticated platforms, fledgling marketplaces, skilled nixers, volatile assets, and ambitious pioneers that exist uniquely in virtual environments.
Opportunity
The Virtual Economy Technology Radar - An interactive map
This interactive visualisation features 54 key emerging technologies underpinning the Virtual Economy - their current capabilities, level of activity, likely trajectory, and research ecosystem.
Challenge
Social Mobility in the Digital Age - How technology changes the dynamics of social mobility
This project explores the ways in which technology is constraining, facilitating and exacerbating issues with social mobility in developed capitalist democracies.
Insights
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Sep 24 2021
Johanna Costigan
GovernanceTechnologyAI-based emotion recognition tech: China's mould for the 'new' socialist?
The concept of AI-enabled emotion recognition, philosophically in the same vein as predictive policing, aligns with the longstanding CCP principle that thoughts and feelings can be corrected, rendering problematic behaviour impossible to carry out.
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Sep 17 2021
Anthony Kelly
Digital AnthropologyTechnologySimulate this! When digital twin technology goes human
Digital twins—virtual representations of physical objects—help monitor physical systems in real-time. But AI-powered human digital twins could become a proxy for actually existing agents ... including not only physical people, but approximations of their thoughts and feelings.
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Sep 9 2021
Michal Rozynek
GovernanceForesightHow universal basic income could fuse public goods to virtual economy interests
Covid-19 has normalised unconditional welfare transfers, even in societies traditionally resistant to public “giveaways.” What existing precedent exists for universal basic income, and how could it impact the virtual economy ... not to mention the one most of us still live in?
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We are an interdisciplinary team of economists, journalists, scientists and researchers interested in the consequences of technological and societal change.
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Copyright L’Atelier 2021