# Histories & Speculation This theme places AI within longer histories of technology, media and imagined futures. By examining earlier promises, overlooked alternatives and ways of preserving knowledge, it supports our use of speculation to explore the futures that education and creative practice could help make possible. ### [[Fiction as a method to imagine higher education futures]] Stefan Hrastinski proposes education fiction as a way for students and academics to imagine desirable and undesirable futures and use those possibilities to inform action in the present. ### [[Fiction in research_The case of education fiction]] An overview distinguishes informed and speculative fiction as research methods, showing how stories can draw on data, workshops and literature while asking how their quality should be judged. ### [[As We May Think]] Vannevar Bush’s illustrated 1945 essay imagines the memex and associative trails through stored knowledge, providing a historical reference for today’s ideas about digital memory and research tools. ### [[Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late]] A retrospective on Apple’s 1987 concept video connects its imagined voice assistant and tablet with later developments, offering a concrete example of speculative design’s relationship to technological change. ### [[Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?]] An essay considers how AI might reshape humanities teaching and scholarship, arguing for education centred on lived experience, open questions and the work of becoming human. ## Further Reading: [[Further Reading - Histories & Speculations]]