18.08.2026

globalTA Webinar 22/09/26

The next globalTA webinar takes place on 27th September 2026 and is devoted to the topic of the “Future” in TA. Australian colleagues will argue that TA has somewhat failed to adequately engage the public.

📅 Date: 22^nd of September
⏰ Time: 3-4 PM CET

🎤 Speakers: Peta Ashworth and Clark Miller

📚 Topic: The Future in Technology Assessment: A Question of Democracy and Imagination

The question of who gets to imagine and shape the technological future and how it gets built is one of the central questions facing contemporary societies. Around the world, a growing tide of public opposition is rising against technological innovation and infrastructure — AI, data centers, renewable energy, robots, tech-enabled violence, destruction, and corruption — grounded in a fear of powerlessness over the future. This fear and opposition, we propose, reflects a failure of technology assessment. Across its myriad forms, technology assessment is a practice whose foundational goal is to open up technology to critical review and evaluation in order to empower people to make informed decisions about how to build better technological futures. This is especially true in democracies, in which the ultimate authority to imagine and build the future lies with the demos, the people. If democracies are facing a public revolt over the technological future, it is because technology assessment has failed to adequately engage the public in imagining, deliberating, and informing how that future will get built, or in many instances, governments and industry have failed to include the expertise of TA and futures practitioners in the development process.

🔗 Register now: https://kit-lecture.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/J-XY4yLBRA-A8VHp_gcCvA