ABSTRACT
What are emerging technologies? How do they participate in our experienced present and possible futures? In this chapter I set the scene for understanding emerging technologies and life at the edge of the future. I outline how the trajectories of emerging technologies are typically shaped, and the institutional, organisational and societal stakeholders involved in them. I situate artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, and the systems and technologies they implicate and the contexts in which they are researched. These emerging technologies and their possible futures, I insist, need to be investigated and designed in the sites of everyday life. Therefore, I call for a radical rethink of scholarship and practice in the social sciences, whereby researchers must rethink the situatedness and possibilities of expertise, our own situatedness and our interventional capabilities.
