Organised by the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence together with Kreuzberg's science-fiction bookshop Otherland, the workshop is part of the SCRIPTS Forum series, which brings interdisciplinary research into public dialogue. This year's question: how is artificial intelligence reshaping the global political order?

Participants came from strikingly different worlds — among them a doctoral researcher, the Head of AI at a Bavarian company, and a retired IT specialist who first learned programming in ones and zeros. The idea behind the project: to shape the future, we need to learn how to think about it together, rather than simply waiting for it to happen to us.

The chosen tool: scenarios — a method developed in the 1950s by nuclear strategist Herman Kahn to simulate the "unthinkable" realities of the Cold War, and popularised since for wider audiences by authors like Florence Gaub and Jane McGonigal. Scenarios don't predict the future; they make possible developments visible and open up paths for action.

Three published authors and journalists — Theresa Hannig (science-fiction author and taz columnist), Isabella Hermann (political scientist and SF expert), and Jens Lubbadeh (journalist at Die ZEIT and SF author) — coached participants through building three different AI futures. Drawing on these sessions, each then wrote a short story of their own.

The results are now live on the SCRIPTS website:

In the Dystopian Scenario, Theresa Hannig imagines a Berlin in 2036 governed by a far-right party even less competent than the AfD, where AI has automated daily life into mediocrity, unemployment, and quiet despair — while the city prepares to host Olympic Games it can no longer afford to actually build.

In the Utopian Scenario, Isabella Hermann reflects on what it would take to imagine a positive AI future — and dares to sketch one out.

In the Ambivalent Scenario, Jens Lubbadeh tells the story of two Berlin teenagers in 2036 whose AI futures couldn't be more different, depending on which side of the city they grew up on.

Together, the three stories resist a single verdict on artificial intelligence. Instead, they make visible just how much is still being decided — and by whom. "Contested Futures" continues the SCRIPTS Forum's mission of bringing research out of the seminar room and into public conversation, using fiction not to predict what will happen, but to ask what we want to happen, while there's still time to choose.

Read the full story of the workshop and the panel discussion that followed at Otherland bookshop here.