What will it mean to be a researcher in 2040 — and who will decide?
As part of the foresight study The Futures of Researchers' Careers: What Challenges for EU Policy?, funded by DG RTD, set of scenarios was developed to explore how research work in Europe could evolve over the next fifteen years. This summary presents the scenario component of the study: the world research is likely to operate in, and an aspirational alternative to it.

The context: Knowledge in Society 2040
By 2040, at global level research runs on a powerful, ever-present AI layer — an "intelligence infrastructure" that learns from research, industry and society and shapes how knowledge is created, shared and used. It drives three linked shifts: research speeds up as AI opens access to almost all human knowledge and shortens the path from idea to market; power concentrates, as a few "Super Big Tech" actors control the key AI platforms and states compete for strategic advantage; and contestation grows, as trust erodes under a flood of AI-generated output and the gap widens between those AI strengthens and those it leaves behind.

Left on this trajectory, and with current policy lagging behind, research careers come under pressure: a workforce split into tiers with no bridge between them, the value of public research captured by the owners of AI platforms, AI deciding what becomes visible and fundable, and slow recognition of hands-on empirical work and the new roles emerging around AI.

The response: Living Knowledge 2040
Living Knowledge 2040 is the study's aspirational alternative. It assumes the same dynamics as the context scenario — acceleration, concentration and contestation — but channels them toward public value. It is built on four layers:

The core — a Glass Engine, advanced AI that Europe builds and runs as civic infrastructure: transparent, publicly governed, auditable and contestable; and a Commons Authority that keeps it and the wider knowledge ecology in the public interest.
A trustworthy, plural knowledge ecology — where empirical and synthetic knowledge are equally valued, credibility rests on traceability rather than the journal a work appears in, dissenting views are actively surfaced, and collective and once-invisible work is recognised.
New forms of operating — from human–AI swarms and public "Action-Networks" to quest-based research, automated public research infrastructures, and AI-powered entrepreneurship — with careers moving fluidly among them.
An explicit ethos — wellbeing, collective work, public value, openness, meaning and full expression as the values the system is built to serve.

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How the scenarios were developed

The scenarios are exploratory tools, not predictions: they set out plausible, internally consistent futures against which today's policies can be tested. Three were developed by the Institutul de Prospectiva team and progressively validated and enriched through consultation with the project's International Advisory Board, with one dedicated meeting per scenario type between May and June 2026. Together they trace a path from the world research will operate in, through the gaps in current policy, to an aspirational alternative.

The context scenario ("Knowledge in Society 2040") is global in scope and focuses on how knowledge — and its embodied forms of technologies, policies and norms — is produced, circulated and translated into societal impact. It was built by extrapolating a set of key drivers of change and exploring how they interact and amplify one another, with particular attention to the major actors — scientific communities, states, private-sector actors and society at large — and to the evolving interplay between their strategic, economic and normative interests.

The inertial scenario provides the bridge. It sets out thirteen current challenges facing Europe's research and innovation workforce, grouped into four categories: a fragmented research market; funding and employment structures; the training and socialisation model; and assessment and recognition systems. Each challenge is examined along three dimensions — its current state ("the Now"); its likely 2040 trajectory, assuming balanced optimism about current EU and national policies; and a "context push" that tests that trajectory against the global picture from the context scenario. This surfaces two kinds of tension: those where existing policies fall short of the projected dynamics, and entirely new ones that current frameworks do not yet recognise as problems and that would require genuinely new policy categories.

The aspirational scenario ("Living Knowledge 2040") was built in three steps, starting from the key tensions projected for 2040. These were put through a simplified Causal Layered Analysis that reopened some of the system's underlying premises — who owns the AI infrastructure, how contribution is recognised, how value is capitalised — producing twelve dimensions, each described as a current perspective and a potential shift by 2040. Clustering these dimensions gave the scenario its four-layer structure: the AI infrastructure and its public governance; the principles of the knowledge ecology around it; that ecology's forms of operating; and the overarching values of the ecosystem. Deliberately ambitious but not utopian, it assumes the same forces as the context scenario — pervasive AI, platformisation, concentration and contestation — but channels them toward public value.

We are living through a transition that feels, at once, like collapse and awakening. The crises surrounding us—ecological breakdown, technological acceleration, geopolitical fragmentation—are often treated as separate problems. But they are not. They are symptoms of a deeper rupture: a failure in how we perceive reality itself.

This is the beginning of the “Big Shift.” Not merely a historical turning point, but a transformation in consciousness. The dominant frameworks through which humanity has understood itself—nation, progress, even “humanity” as a unified moral subject—are no longer sufficient. They fragment under pressure because they were never grounded in the deeper fabric of existence. They abstracted us from the Earth, from each other, and ultimately from being itself.

Long before modern crises, ancient traditions understood something we have forgotten: the Earth is not an object. It is a living, sacred reality. Early liturgical texts and cosmologies did not separate matter from meaning. To speak of the Earth was already to speak of order, of balance, of participation in a larger whole. This was not “ecology” in the modern scientific sense—it was a lived metaphysics.

What has been lost is not knowledge in the narrow sense, but a way of knowing. The modern world, in its pursuit of control and clarity, reduced reality to what can be measured, extracted, and optimized. Technology is not the root problem; it is an extension of this perception. We did not simply build machines—we built a worldview that sees the world as machine.

And so we arrive at a strange paradox: we speak constantly of “saving humanity,” yet we do not even know what “humanity” means. It is an abstraction, a moral placeholder, often detached from real conditions and embedded inequalities. In trying to center humanity, we displaced the Earth. And in doing so, we undermined the very conditions that make human life possible.

A different orientation is needed. Not a rejection of humanity, but a re-centering within a larger field of existence. To love the Earth is not a poetic gesture—it is an ethical necessity. It means recognizing that harm to ecosystems is not external damage but a form of self-destruction. It means reframing ethics from human-centered to Earth-centered, from domination to participation.

This is where the future becomes most uncertain—and most significant. Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are often framed in terms of capability and risk. But the deeper question is ontological: what kind of intelligence are we creating? If intelligence is participation, then ethical design requires more than safeguards—it requires alignment with the structures of reality itself.

We stand, then, at a threshold. The path forward is not a return to the past, nor a blind leap into technological futurism. It is a synthesis—a planetary civilization that draws from ancient wisdom while engaging modern knowledge. A civilization that recognizes the plurality of perspectives without losing sight of underlying unity.

This requires new forms of leadership, new frameworks of foresight, and a redefinition of progress. Not growth for its own sake, but alignment with the conditions that sustain life and meaning.

Ultimately, the future is not something we predict. It is something we participate in. Every action, every perception, contributes to the unfolding of reality. The question is not whether change is coming—it is whether we are capable of aligning with it.

To become planetary beings is not to transcend the Earth, but to belong to it fully. To act with awareness that we are not separate observers, but active participants in a living, dynamic cosmos.

The shift has already begun. The only question is whether we recognize it—and whether we are willing to follow it to its conclusion.

The Knowledge of our Civilizations in 2040 — a foresight workshop hosted by the Foresight Team of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI — took place on 20–21 November 2025 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as part of the project Eye of Europe.

At the heart of the two-day workshop was the open question of how future civilizations might define, create, harness,
value, share, embed and apply knowledge. The workshop’s aim was to explore both conceivable and desirable alternative
futures for the knowledge of our civilization in Europe by the year 2040 by letting participants explore the theme of the
knowledge of our civilization through a facilitated process consisting of three main stages.

Across four working groups, participants started off by identifying different key domains of trouble in the current state of knowledge, with the notion of trouble being interpreted in a positive way as an area of investigation and exploration where things are in deep flux.

To delve into these areas of trouble, participants then applied the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) framework twice: first, to critically examine the present by unpacking common narratives, systemic structures, shared worldviews and deep cultural metaphors; and then again, in a creative turn, to imagine desirable alternative futures. This second phase involved reconstructing alternative metaphors, beliefs, and systemic designs, eventually boiling down to a transformed litany.

The workshop set out to explore how future civilizations might define, create, value, and apply knowledge in 2040. Across four “troubles of knowledge,” participants showed that debates about knowledge are never purely technical but deeply political, ethical and cultural. The discussions revealed that today’s knowledge regimes are under pressure, making transformation both necessary and imaginable.

A first major theme concerned power and hierarchy. Many groups described current knowledge systems as exclusionary, dominated by majority viewpoints, elite institutions, economic logics and narrow validation mechanisms. Knowledge was seen as concentrated in authorities, shaped by growth paradigms and entangled with private or geopolitical interests. Declining trust and ideological polarization further destabilize what counts as shared truth. The central question recurring across groups was: Who defines knowledge, and for whom?

A second controversy focused on the purpose of knowledge. Is it primarily a tool for efficiency and competition, or a foundation for collective well‑being and long‑term responsibility? Several groups criticized current reward systems, the reduction of humans to “resources” and the dominance of problem‑solving logic over ethical and relational dimensions. The tension lies between knowledge as power and knowledge as care.

In the reconstruction phase, however, a shared horizon of hope emerged. Knowledge in 2040 was reimagined as relational, processual and co-created. Groups used metaphors such as mycelium networks, symphonies, assemblies, rivers and verbs to describe knowledge as something circulating, regenerative and sustained through relationships. Uncertainty, discomfort and failure were reframed as essential to meaningful knowledge creation.

Participants also envisioned new valuation systems: rewarding intrinsic motivation, collective achievement and planetary well‑being rather than market success. Ideas ranged from re‑commoning knowledge and revising metrics of excellence to fostering transdisciplinarity, citizen participation and relational education.

While the groups differed in where they anchored transformation - epistemic critique, moral renewal, valuation systems or institutional reform - they converged on a broader reorientation: from knowledge as possession to knowledge as relationship; from authority to dialogue; from scarcity to regenerative abundance.

Ultimately, the knowledge of our civilization in 2040 is imagined as being less about mastering complexity than about inhabiting it responsibly. It emphasizes shared meaning over information production and stewardship over competition. Whether such a transformation unfolds will depend not only on institutional reforms, but on the metaphors that guide our imagination. As the workshop demonstrated, changing how we speak about knowledge may be one of the most powerful steps toward changing how we imagine and eventually live it.