Emerging technologies are transforming societies at a pace that already outstrips our capacity to understand, anticipate, or govern their consequences. Artificial intelligence is the most discussed, and arguably most urgent and far-reaching of these — but it is not the only one. Biotechnology, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and advanced robotics each carry their own trajectories of disruption. The impacts of these technologies increasingly interact with one another in ways no single discipline can track. PRESCIENT is a new research centre at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS), established to address this challenge head on. It will contribute to our understanding of technological impact before technologies are fully deployed, and help develop the practical tools that governments, industries, and communities need to steer that impact toward broad societal benefit.
The societies that will be most capable of navigating the age of transformative technology are those that understand it earliest. PRESCIENT aims to help make Sweden one of them.
While the massive impact of AI is becoming clear, it represents only the leading edge of a broader wave of transformative technologies. Biotechnology, quantum computing, advanced robotics, and synthetic biology each carry profound consequences for society — and increasingly converge and interact in ways that compound uncertainty. The consequences of their adoption at societal scale remain poorly understood across all of these domains.
Research and development across these fields is driven largely by industry, set by near-term, product-driven incentives. This leaves critical gaps in questions that matter over decadal horizons: societal applicability and goals, macroeconomic shifts, employment dynamics, governance architectures, geopolitical stability, inclusive prosperity, and — above all — safety and alignment with fundamental moral values. For AI in particular, the pace of change is such that technological and geopolitical shifts unfold on monthly rather than decadal timescales, making anticipation all the more urgent.
PRESCIENT brings together horizon-scanning disciplines alongside state-of-the-art AI research and a technical prototyping laboratory, so that research and policy agendas can continuously anticipate systemic challenges and opportunities across the full landscape of emerging technologies, rather than merely react to them when these technologies already are in place, which is the unsatisfactory situation today.
PRESCIENT integrates four methodological pillars that rarely operate together. No single discipline can predict how AI and other emerging technologies reshape labour markets, inequality, and social cohesion; determine which of those futures is acceptable; and translate that into actionable policy and deployable tools. PRESCIENT will host the full range of expertise needed to work across all four and to help ensure that they continuously inform each other.
The centre will generate quantitative forecasts of emerging technologies' societal trajectories with explicit uncertainty bounds, covering labour markets, macroeconomic dynamics, inequality, and social cohesion. AI will be the primary focus, but the modelling framework will extend across converging technologies.
The centre will provide normative assessments of the ethical and political consequences of emerging technologies determining which futures are desirable and what values,democratic procedures and fair gouvernance issues with which technological development must be aligned..Moreover, most decisions in this area are under risk or even radical uncertainty with which modern development in decision theory can help.
The centre will produce evidence-based policy scenarios and recommendations directed at decision-makers in Sweden, EU, and internationally. Drawing on IFFS's established networks to policymakers, PRESCIENT will translate research findings into concrete guidance. The research will be used to identify intervention points and evaluate governance options and provide scenario-based tools that help decision-makers navigate uncertainty rather than be paralysed by it.
The centre will operate a co-located prototyping laboratory where AI engineers and researchers work together with foresight analysts. Insights from the other three pillars will be translated into concrete, deployable artefacts: open-source models, policy toolkits, simulation tools, and guidelines that external partners can immediately test and deploy.
This tight loop — foresight surfaces emerging challenges, economists quantify them, ethicists assess them, engineers prototype solutions — is designed to ensure that publications are accompanied by tangible artefacts, and that tools remain grounded in rigorous analysis. Output will span peer-reviewed papers, open-source code and models, and policy toolkits and recommendations.
PRESCIENT is part of the Institute for Futures Studies, a non-profit research foundation established in 1973. This will anchor the centre in IFFS's unique combination of social science and humanities expertise and its established networks to policymakers, while operating under a public-interest charter that prioritises societal benefit over commercial return.
The majority of the centre's operations will be funded by long-term grants that insulate research agendas from special interests and market pressures. PRESCIENT will also engage in bilateral projects with organisations and industry, governed by strict neutrality clauses that protect research independence. Neutral governance structures and privacy clauses will maintain the trust of all partners.
PRESCIENT is led by Professor Gustaf Arrhenius (philosophy) and Professor Pontus Strimling (analytical sociology).
Other participating researchers in the centre are: Docent Moa Bursell (sociology), Professor Anandi Hattiangadi (philosophy), Professor Eva Erman (political science), Professor Krister Bykvist (philosophy), Professor Orri Stefánsson (decision theory), Dr Emma Engström (engineering), Docent Martin Kolk (demography), Professor Kimmo Eriksson (applied mathematics), Professor Malcolm Fairbrother (sociology), Dr Markus Furendal (political science), Dr Karim Jebari (philosophy), Professor Carina Mood (sociology), Dr Joe Roussos (decision theory), Dr Anders Sandberg (computer science), Dr Jason Tucker (social and policy sciences), Dr Irina Vartanova (psychology).
PRESCIENT maintains close connections with those building the technologies it studies. For AI, this will include leading Swedish universities and partners such as DeepMind and Recorded Future. The centre builds partnerships in other key technology domains, including biotechnology and quantum computing, to ensure the same frontier access across its broader mandate.
The centre builds on and further develop IFFS relationships with government bodies, national as well as EU, and multilateral organisations to ensure that tools are field-tested in varied real-world contexts and that policy outputs reach the decision-makers who can benefit from them. Joint pilot projects validates artefacts before broad deployment.
Impact will be tracked across four dimensions:
For more information, get in touch with us: [email protected].
