In recent years, intense debate has emerged surrounding the long-term impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human society. While some envision AI as a catalyst for utopia, others warn of catastrophic consequences. These discourses are often infiltrated by predictions allegedly based on objective data and robust foresight, but they are viewpoints based on specific norms and assumptions and concern a highly uncertain future. Furthermore, these perspectives often oversimplify the complex relationship between technology and society, treating the future as predetermined by technological advancement. The aim of this seminar is to critically analyze the discourse on the long-term future of AI society and reconsider the value of exploring such future visions from a ‘technosocial’ perspective. The technosocial approach that will be advanced during our seminar indicates that discourses on the future of AI society shall not be narrowed to prophecy and prediction but are fueled and shaped by specific norms and assumptions, which need to be unraveled. The goals of our seminar are: (1) Develop a critical analysis of the normative and conceptual assumptions of utopian and dystopian discourses about the future of AI in our societies; (2) Explore the significance of these futuristic discourses aside their aspiration of being objective predictions; (3) Propose technosocial future visions of a human society co-existing with AI systems. This approach to AI futures in hermeneutic spirit is based on the conviction that upholding a sharp distinction between technology and the social is one of the ideological constraints that many AI futures could help us overcome. The organizers seek to build the foundations for long-term cooperation between the two main participating institutions (TU Delft & Hokkaido University). Aside from advancing our main research questions, it is our dedicated goal to build a research group that can be elevated to the status of a Special Interest Group within the Society for Philosophy of Technology (SPT) (https://www.spt.org/sigs/).

Antibubbles represent an innovative drug delivery concept, which permits delivery of drugs through the vascular system and facilitates to overcome biological barriers. As a consequence, a Dutch group of drug delivery experts met their respective counterparts from Japanese institutes in Sapporo, Japan to exchange experiences with this promising delivery technology, kick-start future collaborative research work and to conduct first joint experiments. First results have been accepted for the 29th European symposium on Ultrasound Contrast Imaging in Rotterdam on the 18th-19 of January 2024 with the title “In vitro evaluation of Antibubbles as local delivery and cancer cell permeabilization”.

Synthetic biology engineers living systems to perform useful functions. For example, we engineer small bacteria's genomes to produce expensive vitamins or to degrade plastic waste. However, cells do not behave the same even when their genetic information is the same. For example, when we engineer cells to produce a specific molecule, some cells produce it efficiently while other cells do not. This is a problem because the overall yield of production is reduced because of inefficient cells. This increase in the production cost is one of the major obstacles that need to be overcome to commercialise many synthetic biology applications. To solve this problem, we need to know what is happening inside each cell. However, it is not an easy task because a cell is a complex object. Even a simple bacterial cell has more than one million molecules inside its cytoplasm. In this proposal, we will develop a simple cell mimic - an artificial cell system made from scratch using synthetic elements - to observe what is happening inside a cell. This will help us to understand why cells show different responses despite sharing the same genetic information. A microfluidic device will be used to produce artificial cells at a scale large enough to analyse different populations. Then we will observe individual cells and their responses. The result will be analysed with mathematical modelling to understand why certain cells behave differently from other cells. This knowledge will allow us to engineer cells that exhibit homogeneous and consistent behaviour. In a long term, this work will help commercialise a lot of synthetic biology applications by reducing their production costs.