Berlin, Friedrichstraße. The year is 2036: written on sticky notes, flipcharts, laptop screens. On this Friday afternoon in May, 17 people from different professions and generations have gathered at the Hertie School to practise something that has become increasingly difficult in times of overlapping crises and rapid technological change: imagining a future in which we would actually like to live.

Among them are a doctoral researcher, the Head of AI at a Bavarian company, and a retired IT specialist who first learned programming in ones and zeros. Some have read countless science-fiction novels; two have even written a few themselves. One participant studies the neo-colonial behaviour of tech giants, another researches economic models beyond growth.

“Contested Futures” is the name of this unusual experiment, which seeks to bring together two worlds that more often have a one-sided relationship: science and fiction. Organised by the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence together with Kreuzberg’s science-fiction bookshop Otherland, the event forms part of the SCRIPTS Forum. The series aims to bring interdisciplinary research into public dialogue – this year asking how artificial intelligence is reshaping the global political order.

“To shape the future, we need to learn how to think about it together, rather than simply waiting for it to happen to us,” explains Boris Nitzsche from SCRIPTS, outlining the idea behind the project. The chosen tool: scenarios. Modern scenario planning was developed in the 1950s by nuclear strategist Herman Kahn as a way of simulating the “unthinkable” realities of the Cold War.

Today, scenarios are a standard instrument in futures studies and, through authors such as Florence Gaub and Jane McGonigal, have also become familiar to wider audiences. Scenarios are not meant to predict the future, but to make possible developments visible, identify moments of decision, and open up paths for action. Rather than offering a single forecast, they present trial chapters of the future.

Theresa Hannig (science-fiction author and columnist for taz), Isabella Hermann (political scientist and SF expert), and Jens Lubbadeh (journalist at Die ZEIT and SF author) act as coaches in this training camp for the imagination. The participants divide into three groups to develop their scenarios: dystopia, utopia, and ambivalence. The rules seem simple enough: keep it plausible and concrete – no miracles, no aliens!

Two and a half hours later, the presentations begin. The dystopia goes first – and despite all its bleakness, it is remarkably entertaining. Perhaps because bad futures lend themselves so readily to storytelling: they contain drama, punchlines, and the aesthetic appeal of decay. The scenario begins in the waiting room of a robo-doctor and ends at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Except the audience is not watching real athletes, but giant screens instead. Once again, Berlin failed to secure the actual Games. Laughter, applause.

The ambivalent scenario takes us into schools: while children at one school learn with a state-run, public-interest AI, wealthier parents at another pay for premium systems with better models and platinum-level access. Old class divides meet new forms of accessibility. The utopian scenario also centres on education: here, AI becomes a “buddy” for learning and the common good, freeing teachers to focus on ethics, debate, and mental health – while also making it possible to build a skate park in record time, because bureaucracy has effectively been pulverised by technology, creating a sense of agency rather than frustration with the system.

Of the three scenarios, utopia was perhaps the hardest to construct. While dystopia and ambivalence can extrapolate existing conditions into darker directions, a positive vision has to do far more: not merely warn, but promise – without becoming naïve or dull. Could this explain why hopeful visions of the future are so rare, despite calls from organisations ranging from the Club of Rome to Scientists for Future, all urging the need for positive imaginaries in the face of eroding democracies?

“Designing a genuinely desirable utopia – rather than slipping back into some hidden anti-utopia or authoritarian system, which is where the mind tends to go much faster,” Isabella Hermann later reflected, “was a major challenge.” Before participants in her group could sketch their first positive vision, they first had to repair the political foundations: breaking up monopolies, socialising tech profits, introducing a basic income – discovering along the way that working on the future can sometimes feel like travelling back to the sit-ins of the 1970s.

How strongly one’s own worldview shapes the causalities projected into the future also became apparent during the final discussion round. One participant noted this as an interesting observation, thereby identifying an important side effect of scenario planning: becoming more aware of one’s own assumptions about the present.

Jens Lubbadeh found it striking how little the workshop resembled the simplistic black-and-white narratives about AI often found in the media: “Nobody simply talked the apocalypse into existence.” One participant was surprised by the “range of uncertainties” that had become visible. And one question lingered in the room: is AI more of an accelerant for crises – or a catalyst for good?

The following evening, discussions continue at Otherland bookshop in Kreuzberg’s Bergmann neighbourhood. Shelves packed to the ceiling with fantastic stories surround the audience. In front of them sit Hannig, Hermann, and Lubbadeh, joined by political scientist, China expert, and SCRIPTS researcher Professor Genia Kostka from Freie Universität Berlin. AI, Kostka argues, does not automatically strengthen democracy or autocracy; rather, it reinforces the system into which it is embedded. In liberal orders, it can foster transparency, participation, and fairness. In authoritarian systems, it can strengthen control, efficiency, and regime stability.

China, she argues, is particularly worth watching. Some debates there are already far more advanced than in Europe; investment in AI is greater, and the approach to the technology less hesitant. Europe, by contrast, risks becoming more of a “taker than a shaper” in the AI age. In ten years’ time, Kostka predicts, Berlin may well be debating the very issues China is grappling with today.

One such issue is the emotional attachment between humans and machines. Research shows that a third of users describe chatbots as “friends”, while 60 per cent say thank you to them. “You can marvel at these findings,” Kostka says. “But you could also simply have watched the film Her years ago.” While science is still scrambling to catch up with developments, AI has long been familiar territory for science fiction: in books and films, machines have been loving, comforting, and deceiving humans for decades.

This interplay between imagination and research is precisely what gives the format its appeal. Science fiction is not “a crystal ball that lets you see the future”, as Wolfgang Tress from Otherland puts it, “but a space for thought”. Science, meanwhile, can make visible the realities of power, governance, and global inequality. Together, they generate plausible scenarios that people may either wish to prevent or strive towards.

But what can actually be done to make utopia more likely? Supporting NGOs, getting involved in political parties, using alternative social media platforms, strengthening open systems – the answers offered by the panel seem small in the face of overwhelming technological power. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point of scenarios: to make the abstract concrete enough for spaces of action to become visible in the first place.

On this evening in May, the future no longer feels like something crashing down on everyone like the spring outside the door. Instead, it feels like a space one can enter, describe, and change. Without aliens. Though at Otherland, of course, they still have their place.