ABSTRACT
New digital, automated and intelligent technologies and services – including self-driving cars, drones, smart home technologies, digital health applications and more – are becoming increasingly possible, available and integrated into everyday circumstances and imagined near and far futures. Investigating digital futures moreover demands research methods that surpass the conventional anthropological tendency to take refuge in the epistemological and ethical past. The term digital futures has the obvious connotation of being concerned with the roles played by technologies in a time that has not yet happened and is used across many contemporary contexts. Autonomous driving (AD) cars are a pertinent example of a technology in development. AD futures research therefore enabled our team to better understand – theoretically and ethnographically – how people imagined and experienced possible digital futures scenarios and how and why they began to feel confident and comfortable in these situations and when they did not.
