Welcome to a world where Digital Twins aren’t just for jet engines and hospitals. They’re becoming the proxy professionals of the AI era — a second self trained on your CV, your habits, your values. They attend interviews. They negotiate gigs. They monitor your skills gaps and suggest micro-credentials. Maybe they even decide what you should be doing — and for whom.
But who owns that twin, anyway? Who operates it? Where does it ‘reside’?
Who gets to decide what it learns? What happens when your digital self is more productive than you are? What if it gets a better job than you do?
What happens when our labor, identity, and potential are modeled, cloned, and deployed on our behalf? Is this the future of personal agency — or its precise opposite? In this General Seminar we will discuss such things.
Could Digital Twins become the ultimate freelance agent? A career concierge that tirelessly seeks out your next opportunity?
Or will they become gatekeepers — algorithmic versions of ourselves caught in the same power asymmetries we were hoping to escape?
And who benefits most when the future of hiring, managing, and even being a worker becomes data-driven?
In this 90-minute Seminar: We'll sketch speculative near-futures where AI doesn’t just support your job hunt — it runs it.
You’ll create artifacts from imagined HR systems, job ads written for AI, and dashboards for managing fleets of professional twins.
We’ll interrogate the possible: Who are the winners? Who’s left out? What’s the new power dynamic when identity and labor are abstracted and delegated?
We’ll use the tools of Design Fiction and Institutional Science Fiction to surface the strange logics that might emerge in the job markets of 2030 and beyond.
Come with questions, leave with prototypes — and maybe a slightly altered sense of what “having a job” even, you know..means.
Your Digital Twin may already be working. The question is: for whom?
🔑 Key Takeaways 🔑
How Does It Work?
General Seminar offers an alternative to conventional one-way learning experiences like podcasts, TED Talks, or Masterclasses. This is a hands-on seminar where we are all actively engaged in collaborative sense-making by imagining into and creatively conjuring artifacts that represent the futures indicated by the topic. This is followed by sharing and discussions where you will be able to consider how today's emergent themes and cultural idioms may become tomorrow's normal-ordinary-everyday. The goal of General Seminar is to collectively imagine potential futures and derive actionable insights. This is a unique forum for creative stimulation and lateral thinking. General Seminar will invigorates your imagination, leveraging the remarkable efficacy of the imagination to turn ideas into tangible artifacts.
Run of Show
General Seminar is a 90-minute webinar-structured event designed to maximize engagement and insight. Conducted online (and live, in-person on special occasions!)
Participants receive a worksheet and access to the online edition of the Near Future Laboratory's Work Kit of Design Fiction
❥ Reception (5 minutes): Participants are welcomed and introduced to the topic.
❥ Design Fiction Breakout (25 minutes): Using the provided Worksheet, groups of 2-3 participants jump in the Near Future Laboratory's time machine and travel to the near future to engage in creative exploration, world building by 'finding' and imagining the kinds of artifacts one might stumble across in a possible near future world.
❥ Seminar (40 minutes): Facilitated group discussion to delve deeply into the topic.
❥ Wrap-Up (10 minutes): Summary and conclusions.
This immersive, collaborative format distinguishes General Seminar as a space for actionable creativity and innovative thought.