34th Annual Market Research Seminar: The Next Human
“In the coming decades, we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence." -Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus
Yuval Noah Harari calls AI an “alien intelligence" - not because it threatens us from the outside, but because it now sits alongside us, making decisions, generating ideas, shaping choices, and slowly rewriting what it means to be human. For the first time in 70,000 years, Homo Sapiens shares the world with another agent capable of authorship.
The Next Human is the one who lives with it.
She wakes to a feed curated by an algorithm she has never met. She forms opinions in conversations with chatbots that know her better than her friends do. She buys things she did not know she wanted, from creators she has never seen in person, in vernaculars her grandparents never used. She is, by every meaningful measure, a different kind of consumer; and possibly a different kind of person than the one our traditional methods were built to study.
Attention has fragmented, loyalty has thinned and identity arrives in plural. The journey from desire to purchase, once a straight line, now loops through creators, comment sections, group chats, and a recommendation engine that knew the answer before the question was asked. Something is shifting in the people we study. We are watching a new species emerge- not biologically, but culturally, behaviourally, cognitively.
The trouble is that the territory has changed faster than our maps. The frameworks we trusted- segments, funnels, journeys, personas were drawn for a slower, more legible world. The Next Human lives somewhere we have not yet charted.
And so, the researcher’s task, in this moment, is the oldest one in the trade: to go to the frontier, take honest readings, and bring back the first usable maps of a country that did not exist a few years ago.
The 34th Annual Seminar invites our community to be cartographers. To survey what The Next Human is, where she lives, and how she moves. To redraw the maps before the territory shifts again.
The theme for the 34th Annual Seminar, is THE NEXT HUMAN
The Call for Synopsis is organized around three territories that every cartographer must reckon with- The Terrain, The Compass, and The Instruments.
We invite papers, experiments, and provocations that illuminate any one of them.