The author, Ana Landeta Fernández, was one of around 20 young people to participate in the 2025 GESDA Summit. Here, she shares her reflections on her experience of immersing herself in the worlds of science and diplomacy.
Ana Landeta Fernández is a Master’s student in International and Development Studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Universidad Panamerican (MX), with the thesis “Rethinking the Ethics and Metaphysics of the Human-Nature Relationship with Henry D. Thoreau in Walden”. She has conducted research and coordinated volunteer work with Política de a Pie, a Mexican NGO promoting civic participation through critical thinking and dialogue. Her current research areas are the ethics of technology, global governance frameworks, and civic education. Her MA thesis explores what insights might an Ethics of Attention contribute to some of the current challenges facing global governance frameworks.
As the three days of this year’s GESDA summit unfolded, I stood in admiration as I saw leading diplomats and scientists gather together in an effort to anticipate the real possibilities of the future created by current emerging scientific breakthroughs. Since I firmly believe the only way to construct a more humane and just future is through inclusive and critical dialogue, I felt hopeful to witness such a rare phenomenom happen at least at the level of expertise, spanning a wide variety of academic disciplines and geographic regions.
As these experts discussed likely breakthroughs of their scientific domain in the next 25 years, the lines between the real and the possible, and truth and fiction became blurred. Most were breakthroughs that would allow for the development of technologies that can intervene evermore deeply and precisely into human organisms and living ecosystems, such as neurotechnologies and climate engineering respectively. And they would be happening at an unprecedented scale and speed. So how can we best prepare for them in the context of GESDA’s efforts? I believe the best way is precisely by continuing these dialogical initiatives, while significantly strenghtening the role of the social sciences and humanities in them.
One can see their value through the following case. One of the recurring concerns of this year’ Summit was the technological arms race that the acceleration of these breakthroughs is giving rise to. While there was a deep awareness of this dynamic and its dangers, the question of how to go beyond it was not particularly addressed. No political dynamic exists in a vacuum. Rather, it exists as embedded in a social world and a cultural discourse. It is articulated through a conceptual infrastructure.[1] Philosophy and the social sciences help us see these infrastructures as such. This creates a distance that is necessary to reflect critically on them. When we are unable to visualize these underlying conceptual infrastructures, they become a self-fulfilling prophecies.
We could term one of the predominant conceptual infrastructures of our time technopoly.[2] Among others, technopoly invites the following beliefs: first, that technological innovation is inevitable, relentless, and unstoppable. And second, there’s the belief that technological development in and of itself brings benefits to humanity, and that the key problems we face as a society are technical, rather than human.[3] As a consequence, whoever holds these beliefs has a strong inertia towards believing that any possibility of advancing technological innovation should be taken.
However, once we start reflecting on the aforementioned sociocultural embeddings and conceptual infrastructures, it becomes clear that the beliefs that technopoly invites are one way in which it is possible to understand the relationship between human societies and technology; but by no means the only one. We can then deem, for example, the first belief as technological determinism. We can consider a new technology as capable of improving our means to our end as a species, but not the end in itself.[4] And we can consider those following that inertia as having fallen into the fallacy of believing that «one should because one can».
In this way, philosophy and the social sciences open up horizons of alternative possibilities around how we wish to live in the future. By focusing on reflecting, rather than on solving, they can pace the enthropic nature of the current tech innovation landscape, pull in the reins through intentionality. While it makes sense to try to bypass our political differences by appealing to science or technology on account of their presumed objectivity and impersonality, anything that we incorporate into our activities becomes value-laden, as humans are ‘sense-making beings’.[5]
In this sense, anticipatory science diplomacy, seems to be more a matter of deciphering, negotiating and commiting to values than of anything else. Inasmuch as it is centered around the prospect of better «shared futures» of humanity (alongside with the rest of nature), it critically demands discussion about what humanity is, and about both its responsibilities and needs. This is especially so now, when technological breakthroughs are challenging our current working notions of it. Thus the importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences in it cannot be overstated.
It is my impression, from looking at their initiatives so far, that GESDA is aware of this well enough. This shows through the fact that they’ve organized seminars of experts in the Humanities and Social Sciences «banging their heads together» and coming up with concepts such as «Planetarised Humanity». It also shows through the fact that they’ve included anthropologists and philosophers as speakers for the Summit.
I would only want to stress the importance of continuing this, as well as of seeking to extend these reflections over values, humanity and ethics beyond those already specialized in such discussion, to discussions among the rest of the experts, as well as to the rest of society. In these lines I’d have a couple of suggestions:
- To do capacity building -basic formation in philosophy and the humanities- for both diplomats and the experts in hard sciences or technical disciplines, and maybe also, for representatives of civil society.
- To create initiatives that seek to create public spaces for citizens to discuss about ‘shared futures’, such as has been done through the Geneva Public Portal to Anticipation, but around the dimension of values, humanity and ethics.
- Lastly, when it comes to the design of the GESDA breakthrough radar, maybe one more «pulse» could be added, which is nformed by insights in the humanities and social sciences.
[1] Cf. Jun Sawada, Yashuo Deguchi and Markus Gabriel. «Invited Contribution: Future of Social Science and the Humanities», https://radar.gesda.global/future-of-social-science-and-the-humanities.
[2] Cf. Neil Postman, Technopoly: 1994. “ Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. […] It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” (p. 54).
[3] Cf. Nichol Bradford, «Humanity’s Greatest Challenges Aren’t Technical – They’re Human». Big Think, Published 25 September, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECRKoAq1W9w.
[4] Cf. Henry Thoreau. «Economy», in Walden: […] with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. […] Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end […] We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. […] As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.
[5] Cf. Sawada, Deguchi, Gabriel.
