“The fabric of society is woven with emotional threads, from empathy to outrage, and it is these feelings that shape both harmony and conflict in the world.” — Dalai Lama

Emotion Ecosystems 2040 — the foresight workshop hosted by Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) within the Eye of Europe project — was an inspiring, mind-expanding experience! The co-creation workshop was held on 📅24-25 June 2025 at 📌Conacul Cozieni, near Bucharest, Romania.

💡The event explored the concept of emotion ecosystems — the dynamic, interwoven emotional currents that shape our collectives, whether in communities, institutions, or digital spaces.
To capture this complexity, the event brought together voices from across Europe and from various disciplines: social psychology, psychotherapy, anthropology, philosophy, cultural history, spirituality, political science, art and the creative industries, journalism, media studies, science and technology studies, and robotics.

One portion of the workshop was dedicated to surfacing emotional tensions that mark our time:
🌀 Hyperconnection vs Isolation; 🌍Craving for unity vs Tribal polarization; 🩹 Healing collective traumas vs Solitary coping ...and many more. Using Causal Layered Analysis, participants unpacked these tensions through multiple layers — from surface narratives and systemic structures to the deeper worldviews and metaphors/myths that sustain them.

From there, each working group leaned into the future:
💡 by exploring drivers of change relevant for the tension discussed in their group, and then
💡 by discussing and proposing new metaphors, worldviews, beliefs, and systems that could soften or transform these tensions. Ultimately, the goal was to imagine what more desirable emotional futures might look like.

This is the final report from a foresight study that aimed at supporting the development of the Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe (2025-2027). The study lasted for 18 months and involved a wide range of activities that this report aims at presenting.

These activities aimed at providing early-stage strategic intelligence and sense-making contributions – issues, trends, perspectives, ideas - that could contribute novel elements to the more structured processes of strategic planning that were to follow. The work followed two important directions that were recommended by EFFLA (2012)1 as core elements of bringing foresight into EU R&I policy: knowledge-based review and broad engagement.

Knowledge based review was conducted with the help of the 40 experts who constituted the team that worked on the project. All these experts have contributed as authors to the authorship of the different chapters of this report. About 300 additional experts contributed to the project through its numerous workshops that helped shape the scenarios and ideas about their policy implications, and through membership in the on-line platform of the project at www.futures4europe.eu, which reached 307 people. Last, we acknowledge the 943 experts who responded to our final consultation survey on the implications of our foresight for the directions of EU R&I policy.

The foresight process
The foresight process in support of the 2nd Strategic Plan comprised a wide spectrum of activities:
• As a reference point for the exploratory work, the explicit and implicit impact assumptions of the 1st Strategic Plan were identified and visualised with the help of a qualitative system analysis and modelling tool for causal loop analysis.
• An exploratory analysis of forward-looking sources (e.g. foresight reports, web-based horizon scanning) was conducted to identify relevant trends and signals of unexpected developments. These were discussed in online workshops and on www.futures4europe.eu.
• An outlook on emerging developments in the global and European context of EU R&I policy was developed drawing on a major online workshop in autumn 2021 with some 60 participants, experts and policy makers, who worked with multi-level context scenarios and specific context narratives about emerging disruptions.
• On that basis and in close consultation with the European Commission involving another major workshop in February 2022 which brought together 80 participants, Expert Teams were set up to develop disruptive scenarios in five areas of major interest. Each team ran several internal workshops but also involved further experts and Commission staff in their work, both through the online platform and through a final policy-oriented workshop. The foresight work within the areas of interest resulted in five deep dives on the following topics:
> Climate change, Research, and Innovation: Radical Options from Social Change to Geoengineering
> Hydrogen Economy – A radical alternative
> The EU in a Volatile New World - The challenge of global leadership
> Global Commons
> Transhumanist Revolutions
• Further areas of interest identified since were explored through review papers aiming to capture major trends, developments and scenario sketches in relation to further disruptive developments
> Social Confrontations
> Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Opportunities
> The Interpenetration of Criminal and Lawful Economic Activities
> The Future of Health
• A third major workshop took place in October 2022 bringing together all the thematic strands of work and addressing possible R&I policy implications from this work. Participation in this workshop reached 250 individuals over 2 days.
• Building on the workshop, the online Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey Research4Futures collect suggestions from further experts and citizens about the implications of this foresight work for the priorities of EU R&I policy.

This foresight study has been the most widely engaging foresight exercise yet aiming to support EU R&I policy. Through this broad engagement, the study did not only develop intelligence for the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe but also contributed to the development of an EU R&I foresight community, one that is an asset for future R&I policies across Europe. 

The twelve scenarios in this deep dive are informed by transhumanism, portraying futures in which the human condition – our bodies, functions, and lives – and the features of societies are fundamentally transformed by technology. Even though scenarios are built along the lines of particular scientific and/or technological advancements, the discussion spreads over sociotechnical ensembles and the re-conceptualization of the relationship between technology and society by 2040.

The work leading to this report started with a horizon scanning exercise to identify a series of technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs that may be considered key factors towards re-engineering human nature. In parallel, the authors explored diverse narratives regarding the human condition and significance in the world, dreams and fears embodied in the so-called collective imaginary, echoing through myths and fantasies to literature, cinematography and the wider culture. At the intersection of these explorations, twelve topics were selected and further expanded into scenarios. They are not intended to cover the full spectrum of themes regarding human enhancement, but present a relevant ‘sample’ of potential future trajectories.

We propose these narratives as exploratory scenarios, describing futures where both positive and negative consequences are palpable. They are not normative, outlininga vision of the future deemed desirable. We invite readers to regard them as devices for imagining the future and debating the future. They aim to nurture a reflection on the dynamics of change, future opportunities and potential threats, and in doing so they contribute to future preparedness.

Three types of scenarios were developed:

• The first type describe futures where scientific and technological advancements enhance embodied experiences: Sensory augmentation: extending human senses beyond the natural limits and adding sensorial modalities which are not native to humans. Sensory and brain stimulation, psychedelic microdosing: inducing altered states of consciousness, for healing purposes or for fostering new perspectives on being human. Molecular therapies for delaying aging; and new artificial reproductive technologies allowing people to be fertile until much older age.
• The second type explore futures where human capabilities are extended by embodying non-biological means: a significant share of elderly people using exoskeletons for prolonging active life, for maintaining their mobility or as a form of assisted living; brain-computer interfaces leveraged in semi-automatized work environments, to improve learning outcomes, and to control smart devices; Brain to brain communication supporting cognitive and emotion sharing, leading to the creation of ‘hive minds’ covering multiple aspects of life.
• The third type focus on the simulation and replication of the human body and mind: Digital body twins allowing alert signals for disease prevention and the simulation of the short- and long-term effects of a person’s behavior on their health and body; Digital twins of the brain allowing testing hypotheses in cognitive science, in mental health studies, responses to different types of treatments; Digital immersive worlds – gaming/ fantasy worlds or ‘mirror worlds’ that are replicating real-life environments – hosting interactions among people and automated entities; Digital replicas of the deceased changing the socio-political understanding of grief; and Artificial agents with complex underlying computational procedures (including e.g. self-reflection, development of value system, affective computing) and sophisticated interfaces calling for new theoretical frameworks of consciousness.
  
  
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  The twelve scenarios presented in this deep dive are part of the Foresight towards the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe project, which was conducted by Foresight on Demand Consortium on behalf of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD).