Humanising Our Digital Futures

Humanising Our Digital Futures

The overarching objective of this strand is to generate impactful, world-leading, interdisciplinary research into the challenges and opportunities of digital technology for individuals, cultures and the environment. This includes developing new research methodologies, generating sustainable infrastructures and fostering the long-term development of these programmes alongside the creation of new ones.  Engaging with multiple disciplines and with scholarly transformation, this research will reflect Cambridge’s status and resources.

This strand encompasses Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), and three centres that in 2023 came together to form the Institute for Technology and Humanity: the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) and the Centre for Human-inspired AI (CHIA).

CDH encompasses work on the cultural, social, and epistemic impacts of digital technologies (around data, on everyday life, in relation to literary, cultural forms, media studies, including issues of technocratic rationality, power and justice); digital research methodologies; computational humanities; digital libraries and archival-based research; digital performance, and exhibition (including in cultural institutions); and research exploring cultural and social impacts of emerging technologies – notably around data, and AI informed developments in, for example, face recognition, automatic writing and the social/cultural implications of robotics.

By integrating cross-centre strengths, facilitating synergies, and catalysing new collaborations internally and externally, the three University Research Centres which constitute ITH combine the arts, humanities and social sciences alongside the natural, medical and technical sciences in order to address the great issues of our time.