General Introduction to the Vigie Report 2023

Western societies are facing deep transformations of their life environments, their ‘imaginaries’, the collective rules by which they are organized, and the conditions of existence of the individuals within them. These changes are particularly visible in the degree of virulence of certain political and social clashes: over euthanasia, surrogacy, animal welfare, artificial intelligence and forms of action to combat climate change…

The Vigie Report 2023 — Human Beings and Being Human in 2050: Imaginaries, Societies and Individuals in the West — proposes to study, from a foresight angle, the basic transformations that are changing what it means ‘to be human’, or that might change it in Western societies over the next 30 years. Seven areas of transformation are considered: life and living matter (1), life territories (2), birth and death (3), human-machine interactions (4), gender (5), knowledge (6) and time/timescales (7).

In each of these areas, the Vigie Report 2023 proposes an anthropological foresight approach and hence an overall, cross-disciplinary, future-oriented interpretation of developments that are often analysed by the social sciences in a more segmented or retrospective way.

This general introduction reviews the work process and the methodology used. It also sets out the background to the seven chapters and provides a summary of each of them. The introduction has been translated into English by Chris Turner and can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

The seven chapters of the report are now available to Futuribles International members, but only in French :

• Chapter 1. Vivant : de la domination à la réconciliation ? [Life and Living Organisms: from Domination to Reconciliation?]
• Chapter 2. Territoires : vivre ici, rêver d’ailleurs ? [Life Territories: Live Here, Dream of Elsewhere?]
• Chapter 3. Naissance et mort : la biologie sous contrôle ? [Birth and Death: Biology under Control?]
• Chapter 4. Technologies : machines humaines, trop humaines ? [Technologies: Machines that are Human, All-Too-Human?]  
• Chapter 5. Genre et sexes : de l’assignation à la fluidité ? [Gender and Sex: From Assignment to Fluidity?]
• Chapter 6. Savoirs et institutions : qui croire ? Que croire ? [Knowledge and Institutions: Who to Believe? What to Believe?]
• Chapter 7. Crises et temporalités : de l’accélération à l’éco-anxiété ? [Crises and Timescales: From Acceleration to Eco-Anxiety?]