This co-evolution includes a fundamental reshaping of human identity and the nature of social relationships. For example, humans and artificial agents are beginning to collaborate and co-evolve in hybrid social networks, leading to the emergence of new forms of kinship. Emotional connections with non-human agents have the potential to significantly affect human-to-human interactions via technology-mediated experiences, including the potential for deeper understanding and empathy. The relationship of individuals with each other and with society, technology and the planet is changing, perhaps faster than at any other time in history.

The new concept of “Planetarised Humanity” expresses the complexity that emerges from the converging forces of technological disruption, environmental crises and socio-economic inequalities. It aims to capture changes in the human relational condition that are induced by accelerating socio-economic and technological co-evolution. The implications of Planetarised Humanity are transformative as well as normative, reshaping identity, governance and our species's role on Earth. As we harness unprecedented innovative power, the central challenge remains: how do we conscientiously balance rapid technological advancement with the enduring imperatives of care, equity and planetary stewardship for a flourishing, shared future?

One challenge is that humanity is confronted with the simultaneous presence of positive and negative potentials: for example, the positive aspects of advanced technologies are co-terminous with the potential for extinction from environmental collapse. That forces a form of deep uncertainty and disagreement, which traditional knowledge and decision-making structures are not well-equipped to resolve. This demands the formation of new approaches, concepts, frameworks and methodologies that challenge conventional boundaries.

For instance, a contemporary view of the world is that it is actively being remade through technologies that promise continuous creation and self-organisation. The algorithmic allocation of labour (“gig working”) illustrates this transformation, allowing for the emergence of dynamic organisations that bear comparatively little resemblance to previous industrial corporations, posing consequent challenges for business models, economic justice, stakeholder relations and regulation. One response has been to treat these considerations as the subjects of ad hoc experiment rather than premeditated design.

More broadly, we can speak of “generative planetarity”,¹ under which the planet and its biosphere are increasingly viewed and used as a medium for technological and social experimentation and design. Generativity itself — the capacity to produce or create — becomes a lens through which we understand and interact with our environment. Currently this perspective is being promoted by large corporate and state actors whose goals are unstated, unclear or unaligned with those of broader society. These entities often use narratives that emphasise evolution and intelligence to describe their activities as progressive, while obfuscating their underlying complexities, power dynamics and ethical implications, and thus masking their potential shortcomings. Other perspectives, while potentially also flawed in their own characteristic ways, are urgently required to provide challenge and balance, enabling responsible stewardship of our shared planetary futures.

Against this backdrop, GESDA gathered philosophers, social scientists and humanities researchers to explore these issues during a three-day workshop in Villars, Switzerland. In its mission to anticipate the implications of potential scientific and technological advancements on global affairs, and to develop inclusive and global solutions for a sustainable future, three fundamental questions drive GESDA’s approach:

Who are we, as humans? How can we all live together as societies? How can we ensure the sustainable future of our planet?

Planetarised Humanity has emerged as a diagnostic concept capturing technology-induced transformations in our human relational condition: relation to ourselves, others and the planet. In this brief, it serves as a heuristic and hermeneutical tool to explore potential research breakthroughs in the social sciences and humanities about this evolving multidimensional relationality and the corresponding social, economic, and ecological implications that will shape our collective future. This meeting report follows the structure of the Villars workshop, focused on three themes:

The Phenomena session examined major shifts in identity, community and consciousness triggered by the way that technology is reshaping self-perception, fostering virtual networks, prompting human-AI kinships and altering cognition. Coupled with growing ecological awareness, this session explored these transformative dynamics, crucial for understanding and shaping our planetarised future and its impact on society.

The Tools session aimed to develop frameworks for Planetarised Humanity. While the data and tools needed to observe the transition are improving, interdisciplinary methods for predictive modelling and inclusive societal design are lacking. It explored ways of integrating diverse fields, using transdisciplinary approaches, design thinking and conceptual engineering to understand and shape our interconnected future.

The Openings session explored humanity's co-evolution with changing socioeconomic, political, technological and environmental systems. It focused on understanding these dynamics to devise adaptive governance, ethical AI integration and robust learning systems. The aim was to identify interventions and pathways for a flourishing global human-environment system in the Planetarised Humanity era.

Phenomena

The Phenomena session aimed to explore the profound transformations defining Planetarised Humanity, while examining shifts in identity, community and consciousness. It illuminated the deep fusion of technology with planetary systems, highlighting both immense potential and significant perils. This “tech-planetary fusion”, a core phenomenon, spurred calls for developing human-and planetary-centric, care-based alternatives to purely efficiency-driven paradigms, ensuring that human well-being and ecological health remain central to our future.

Participants investigated how AI, digital networks and environmental interdependence reshape cognitive processes, self-perception and social interaction, including kinship with non-human agents. The session identified emerging phenomena, with the ultimate goal of understanding these dynamics and their critical implications for humanity's interconnected future. The discussions revealed a tension between techno-optimism and a more critical pessimism regarding the future, with calls for a “critical optimism” rooted in realism and care.

Technological Transformation and Imaginaries

“Generative planetarity” is the phenomenon under which Earth is fast becoming a vast laboratory for technological experimentation — exemplified by AI-driven phenomena such as smart cities, automated and autonomous systems, data centres and massive GPU farms — with powerful, often technologically deterministic imaginaries shaping our collective understanding of the future. In this vision of the world, often promoted by large corporations, the planet is portrayed as a self-organising, evolving entity, managed through automated and increasingly autonomous processes.

These dominant narratives often establish “horizons of possibility"² that can feel inevitable, potentially legitimising specific, sometimes authoritarian projects and making it difficult to conceive of alternatives. The very language and concepts used, such as a deterministic construal of evolution in technological or social contexts, can subtly steer thinking and limit the scope of imagined futures. That has created an urgent need for critical analysis and alternative imaginaries to counter the potentially extractive and dehumanising aspects of this trend. This involves questioning existing visions and creating counter-narratives that employing the power of poetics and design while embracing speculation.

For example, ensuring that AI systems operate in a manner that is aligned with human values and interests is a significant challenge. This “alignment problem” presents profound philosophical and ethical dilemmas that scientific methods and technical approaches alone cannot resolve. When designing AI for autonomous vehicles or social networks, for instance, determining what constitutes human interest or beneficial outcomes is not a straightforward scientific or technological question because human values are diverse, culturally influenced and often contradictory.

While the technological creators of such systems have acknowledged this, they have nonetheless deployed these systems at scale while promising to remedy problems as they arise, using the data and knowledge they have amassed and sequestered through their operations. Over time, they have positioned themselves as the only entities capable of addressing the alignment problem. Whether this has led to optimal outcomes and put socioeconomic co-evolution on a beneficial trajectory is questionable.

For this to be addressed, the humanities and social sciences must increase their engagement with such questions as: Whose values should we embed in AI systems operating in a diverse society? How should we design AI systems to make decisions in morally ambiguous situations where there is no objectively correct answer? How do we prevent AI from pursuing goals in way that generates unintended but significant negative consequences for human well-being, societal structures or environmental sustainability?

AI is only one of several powerful technologies implicated in Planetarised Humanity: quantum computing, neurotechnology and synthetic biology, for example, could also be framed this way. To address these issues, the humanities and social sciences must abandon a marginal, purely critical stance. Instead, they need to integrate deeply with scientific and technological frontiers, actively contributing to understanding and shaping these powerful developments to ensure they align with human values, positive potentialities, societal well-being and responsible planetary stewardship.

Environmental and Systemic Interconnectedness

Many conventional ways of thinking place humanity at a central and elevated position in the world, often partially or completely detached from the environment. These have proven increasingly inadequate to deal with the realities of the 21^st century. “Post-human convergence"³, by contrast, aims to capture the simultaneous breakdown of traditional human-technology-nature boundaries amid rapid environmental degradation and rising socio-economic inequality, forcing a rethink of humanism and anthropocentrism.

In contrast to purely reactive or exploitative responses — such as geoengineering fixes, market-based carbon trading or techno-solutionist approaches that maintain extractive relationships with nature — alternative visions that emphasise a more holistic approach are needed. For example, indigenous knowledge systems demonstrate care-based considerations where decision-making integrates impacts on seven generations ahead, decentring immediate human concerns for long-term ecosystem health. From a synchronic perspective, this resonates with “multi-agent systems”, in which humans, machines, nature and social institutions are all seen as interdependent and equally necessary actors, deserving fundamental consideration. Rather than viewing nature as a resource to be managed, this framework recognises forests, watersheds and soil systems as active participants in planetary processes, deserving fundamental consideration in governance and decision-making. This shifts focus towards relationality and distributed agency in addressing systemic interconnectedness.

Social and Cultural Shifts

Contemporary social and cultural transformations are revealing limitations in traditional Western humanist frameworks, particularly their emphasis on singular, autonomous subjects. These frameworks, developed within specific historical and cultural contexts, may not adequately address the complexities of globalised, technologically mediated societies. The concept of “nomadic subjectivity"⁴ offers an alternative analytical framework for understanding contemporary forms of selfhood. This theoretical approach proposes that identity functions as an assemblage — a complex configuration of embodied, embedded and interconnected elements involving both human and non-human entities. Captured by the phrase “I am rooted, but I flow,” nomadic subjectivity describes subjects as both grounded and adaptive, capable of transformation while maintaining coherence. In essence, this concept provides a non-unitary and relational vision of subjectivity that remains constantly open to multiplicity, resisting reductive categorisations. This approach enables conceptualisation of a multiple yet bounded self that moves beyond singular models of rational subjectivity. Rather than replacing existing frameworks entirely, this model expands analytical possibilities for understanding how identities evolve in increasingly interconnected global contexts.

Economic and Power Dynamics

Discussions on economic and power dynamics highlighted the need for new perspectives. For example, the discipline of evolutionary economics, distinct from mainstream views fixated on equilibrium and market success, values dynamic processes, adaptation and learning. It attempts to broaden the definition of value beyond mere economic efficiency to encompass community well-being, ecological health and social justice.

Generative planetarity also drives new systems and forms of territorialisation, such as those underpinning smart cities or automated resource management. These forms create economies and exert influence in ways often invisible or illegible to direct human perception, concentrating power and demanding urgent critical scrutiny.

5-year horizon

New forms of hybrid intelligences between machines and biology will emerge, prompting a philosophical and ethical grapple to understand their natures and implications for human identity.

The planet will be increasingly and visibly used as a medium for “generative” technological and social experimentation (for example, in smart cities and resource management), leading to intensified debates over the narratives framing these changes.

10-year horizon

The centralisation of power among tech elites will become more pronounced, with their preferred narratives and supporting mythologies becoming mainstream and strongly influencing global governance and societal values.

The field of economics, particularly classical approaches, will undergo a significant transformation due to the deep integration of AI, big data and advanced analytics, leading to profound challenges to existing theories of value and economic organisation.

Societal adaptation to, or contestation of, technologically mediated forms of human existence will be widespread, as the design choices embedded in earlier interactive technologies (regarding care, relationality and intelligence) solidify their impact on daily life and social norms.

25-year horizon

The Global South — or Majority World — will become a more central and recognised hub for pioneering economic models and innovation research, focusing on development within planetary limits and integrating diverse knowledge systems, moving substantially beyond older “catch-up” paradigms.

The ethical frameworks and concepts of “care” (or their absence) designed into the foundational AI and hybrid intelligences of previous decades will become deeply embedded within societal infrastructures and have long-lasting consequences for human-technology relationships, social cohesion and individual well-being.

Tools

Building on these transformative phenomena, the Tools session focused on identifying and developing conceptual and methodological tools to comprehend and shape humanity's future in an increasingly interconnected and technologically mediated world. The session aimed to explore the development of frameworks necessary to understand complex global social systems. It identified the essential role of conceptual research and development, including conceptual engineering, to forge new frameworks and identify necessary new concepts and potential narratives for understanding emergent realities. This is linked to the urgent need to rethink many foundational concepts. For example, the modern notion of technology as an autonomous, inherently progressive force is being increasingly challenged. Similarly, the notion of intelligence is moving beyond narrow, human-centric or purely computational definitions towards broader, embodied and relational understandings.

Participants addressed the limitations of current observational approaches in studying global, interconnected social systems and in fostering the development of methodologies for predictive modelling and intentional societal design. While acknowledging the utility of predictive models for anticipating socio-cultural shifts, flexible, reversible and co-designed ethical frameworks are also critically needed to guide intentional societal design and its implementation through technological applications. Key goals included discussing when breakthroughs in these methodologies might occur and how they could evolve to address the challenges and opportunities of an interconnected future, incorporating insights that ranged from philosophy to economics via anthropology, sociology, political theory, digital humanities, futures design and global comparative literature, among others.

Assessment Tools

New technologies, particularly AI, inherently embody human values and knowledge systems that become experimental philosophies for humanity. This presents an opportunity for “philosophical R&D”, where concepts are developed alongside technology to navigate these embedded values. “Futures anthropology"⁵ could become a useful tool, using ethnography to research possible futures and to contest dominant, often flawed, narratives about technology's role and impact. However, robust, evidence-based research will be needed to understand and anticipate socio-cultural impacts, and to move beyond current observational methods towards more integrated frameworks.

Influencing Tools

Planetarised Humanity recognises that the forces influencing socio-economic and technological development are not developed and released, but continually evolving and iterating through reciprocal adaptation that generates novel emergent outcomes. That speaks to the need for new approaches to decision-making around those forces that recognises the deficiencies of past approaches. For example, the European Union’s AI Act is severely limited by treating AI as a finished product rather than as an evolving entity that will be subject to upstream design choices. Future guard-rails for AI and other technologies must embody the plasticity, reversibility and self-constraint of machines themselves.

One additional feature of the new generation of tools will be the need to operate at a planetary scale, considering deep interconnectedness and the co-evolution of human and artificial agents. This requires governance models that can evolve with emergent social norms and technological capabilities, fostering cohesion across diverse value systems and incorporating participatory decision-making across stakeholders. This also speaks to a need to inform and engage citizens in new ways.

Citizens must be empowered with critical and future-oriented literacies and values to engage with the implications of technology and think beyond the future trajectories that are put forward on the basis of current understanding, which are often narrow and deterministic. That requires a move beyond mere competency in any technology to a more holistic mindset which questions and disrupts such “trajectorist” logics⁶. This will be crucial to avoid, for example, the “moral laundering” by which problematic technologies are first presented as inevitable and then legitimised as acceptable, rather than questioning their premises.

Mitigation Strategies

Given the profound socio-economic and technological co-evolutions occurring at scale, strategies will be needed to avoid or mitigate negative potentialities. Moving beyond techno-determinism and moral laundering will require a new form of concrete ethics that interrogates technology's rationale and direction, not just its application. For example, an “ethics of care"⁷ could be a grounding principle and particularly relevant in increasingly decentralised and technologically mediated systems. This involves reclaiming pluralism in AI development, building interpretative space into design and shifting from optimisation to participatory deliberation. But all of these require new ways of thinking about the nature of such systems.

To that end, the “4E cognition” framework, involving embodied, embedded, extended and enacted metrics, offers a more expansive view of intelligence. It moves beyond reductionist or computationalist approaches and highlights the idea that intelligence is what we do together. A key tool within this perspective is “conceptual engineering”, the process of designing new concepts or modifying existing ones for specific pre-established purposes when current conceptual frameworks prove inadequate for understanding or addressing new realities, particularly those anticipated in the future. This process could help to create new conceptual tools to grasp and navigate the profound shifts brought by AI and planetary interconnectedness. Planetarised Humanity is one such tool, a term which GESDA coined to capture our transforming human relational condition (to ourselves, others and the planet) amidst accelerating socio-technological co-evolution with a view to establishing a highly interdisciplinary research field with strong actionability potential.

Crucially, these mitigation efforts require robust, trans-sectoral collaborations. Academia, industry, policy-makers and citizens will need to collectively shape AI's trajectory, ensuring it is socially desirable and democratically legitimate rather than driven by technological possibility or profit.

5-year horizon

Quantum AI dramatically transforms machine intelligence capabilities, requiring new paradigms for computation

AI companions lead to changes in the way language is used and developed, requiring new conceptual frameworks for how meaning is made and evolves

10-year horizon

AI becomes more capable than humans in significant domains, requiring new approaches to human control over key technologies.

The collection of vast amounts of personal data (for example, everything heard or seen by self-driving cars) requires new concepts for knowledge synthesis and narrative development.

25-year horizon

The speed of automation significantly outpaces the creation of new jobs, potentially leading to a large, non-critical work sector.

A new vocabulary for being human emerges based on new socio-technological perspectives.

OPENINGS

The Openings session focused on renewing social sciences and humanities research through what participants termed “utopian processes”⁸ — methodologies that harness collective imagination to develop alternative narratives which challenge prevailing future scenarios. This approach centres on transdisciplinary, action-oriented frameworks for engaging with contemporary transformations. Participants explored intellectual boundaries by connecting science anticipation with imaginative practices to examine how positive futures might be constructed and pursued through potential developments in their own research fields.

The session identified key research opportunities and discussed theoretical and practical challenges. It considered transformative actions, including challenging existing paradigms and sharing concrete experiments for creating positive change. Several actionable proposals emerged, including a “transgressive science”⁹ that questions research norms to foster unorthodox scientific collaborations and interventions, or “science at large”,¹⁰ where research increasingly occurs outside traditional institutions. Another is a “Research University 2.0"¹¹ that focuses on creating new knowledge paradigms through transformational micro-incubators for the social sciences and humanities.

Such institutions will foster environments in which humans can speculate about alternative futures and devise novel ways to realise them. Other calls included creating new mechanisms to connect institutions and foster interdisciplinary dialogue and action, and for GESDA to act as a catalyst for these efforts.

Conceptual Renewal

Our future understanding of human-planetary relations requires a profound need for conceptual renewal. One example is the enduring influence of Judeo-Christian theological conceptions that position humanity as fundamentally separate from animals. By contrast, the concept of symbiosis (in Japanese, 共生 or kyōsei) meaning “co-becoming” offers a transformative lens that emphasises the importance of “becoming” together rather than “being”. This shifts focus from static beings to dynamic, interconnected processes of pattern-reproduction in which a system — particularly a living system — maintains its form and structure over time.

A related concept is that of “incapability”, in which agency is not individual but resides in multi-agent systems. Symbiosis describes the nature of the interconnected system, while incapability describes the status of any individual agent within that system. A simple example is riding a bicycle. The rider propels the machine, but could not do so without the involvement of numerous human and non-human agents: the mechanical parts of the bicycle and their inventors; the industrial and economic agents that assemble and distribute bicycles; those who develop and administer traffic laws, signs and infrastructure; and the cooperation of other road users. The rider, too, is a biological entity that depends on other biological entities in order to be able to propel the bike, from gut bacteria to oxygenating plants. Together, these form a collective “we” as the true doer.

This multi-agent system then becomes the subject of action and responsibility, and suggests a fundamental equality among all necessary agents. That raises the issue of rights for all these entities, opening new ethical and systemic models for an interdependent planetarised existence.

The Role of the Social Sciences and Humanities

The workshop envisioned a strategic repositioning of the social sciences and humanities that builds on empirically-grounded connections between cultural practices, neuroscience, and measurable well-being outcomes. This includes reframing purported objective historical inquiry¹² to examine how cultural memory and heritage practices have functioned as social technologies for conflict resolution and identity formation across diverse societies. These disciplines should inform diplomatic innovations that transcend the limitations of Westphalian state-centric models by developing comparative frameworks for understanding how different cultural traditions approach collective problem-solving and cooperation. Rather than pursuing utopian blueprints, this approach treats aspirational thinking as a methodological tool for expanding the perceived range of viable policy alternatives and fostering evidence-based optimism about institutional transformation.

Science and Design

Transformative shifts in science and design are having profound implications for processes captured by the phrase “science at large” — the increasingly distributed, transnational and socially activated practice of scientific research that operates across fluid networks of diverse actors, from crowdfunded start-ups to grassroots collectives. This creates new forms of knowledge production that challenge conventional institutional boundaries and require novel governance approaches based on commoning and solidarity rather than territorial control, raising questions about risk and benefit distribution. It also coincides with a shift towards embracing biological solutions for planetary challenges where traditional approaches have proven inadequate. For example, gene therapies could challenge existing pharmaceutical and regulatory interventions. This links to the idea of science at large via new, unconventional frameworks through which these biological solutions could be developed and pursued.

Parallel to these shifts in scientific practice, addressing these challenges requires not only new governance frameworks but also distributed approaches to future-making. A “poetics of futures"¹³ views design as a future-making, directed practice essential for addressing crises. Its goal is to foster sustainable innovation through collaborative, awareness-building and literacy-enhancing practices, moving beyond mere aesthetics to shape a viable world. This approach extends to design-driven entrepreneurship that embeds human values into technological devices to foster positive social-ecological impact.

Earthly Focus

"Earthly planetarity”,¹⁴ a complementary variation of planetarised humanity, advocates engaging with the planet through everyday, grounded experiences that move beyond abstract, large-scale visions. This approach calls for reframing scale not as a predetermined hierarchy but in terms of distance and embodied orientation, valuing situated, practical knowledge alongside broader scientific models and inviting a downward look towards the earth beneath our feet. As a research opportunity, this means shifting our understanding of what makes an issue “large” or “small” away from conventional labels and toward lived, physical experience.

5-year horizon

An increased focus on research conducted outside conventional boundaries capitalises on the shift towards accepting biological solutions for planetary challenges.

International collaborations emerge that integrate and commune the social interests and ethical considerations arising from “science at large.”

10-year horizon

A notable growth in design-for-values-driven entrepreneurship launches ventures focused on sustainable products and positive social impact.

Society becomes better positioned not just to adapt to, but to help actively steer, its co-evolution with technoscience.

25-year horizon

The term “transformative science" — scientific research and practice that aims to challenge traditional norms and foster unorthodox collaborations and interventions — gains widespread traction and adoption, although its original meaning becomes diluted as companies and institutions co-opt the language to describe often mainstream or commercially driven activities.

The output from Modern Research Universities 2.0 repositions the social sciences and humanities by demonstrating how ancient wisdom traditions and cultural practices — from contemplative techniques to community-based healing — contain neuroscientifically validated technologies for human flourishing and well-being.