Petteri Repo

This chapter examines artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular large language models (LLMs) as knowledge producers in the Anthropocene. Views on AI are divided: some argue that it offers vast analytical capacity to address planetary challenges, while others warn of dystopian futures and patterns of ecological harm. Yet, the quality of AI inference is often overlooked, leaving its potential contribution to the Anthropocene uncertain in terms of democratic viability and sustainability concerns. To investigate this, the chapter compares findings from human-guided natural language analysis of 158 interviews on democratic innovations with those produced through a structured LLM protocol designed to replicate the same tasks. The results demonstrate that LLMs can generate intelligible and actionable outputs, although these vary in reasoning and abstraction, and warrant further scrutiny. The chapter suggests that LLMs may emerge as autonomous knowledge creators, establishing a non-human form of agency in the Anthropocene. It concludes by arguing that situating this agency within human guidance requires a critical evaluation of LLM inference.

Marketing—when administered responsibly, inclusively, justly, and systemically over place and time—holds extraordinary promise to unlock humanity's potential for a better world, capable of pulling millions of people from poverty, protecting our environment, and creating and sustaining peace, prosperity and well-being. This Macro Ethos is illuminated in an article shared by Macromarketing scholars with interests in scholarly contributions, which impact in ways that enhance the well-being of people, societies and the fragile biosphere we inhabit, on a large scale. Key foci include happiness and its measures; bridging divides via training for collaboration, critical thinking, and a sustainable future; marketing during wartime, with insights from Ukraine and implications for resilience, adaptation and peaceful prosperity; public marketing, Macromarketing, activism and constructive engagement; and developing more responsible, harmonic, and supportive societies in Brazil and beyond. The authors conclude with some discussion, including opportunities for further collaboration and impactful research.

In this essay, we explore AI critically from the perspectives of the corpus and structure of knowledge, human control of knowledge-based processes (including business decision-making and public policymaking), and capitalist ideology. We present a preliminary test of our argument with a re-analysis of a corpus of citizen visions of desirable and sustainable futures across 30 countries in Europe, demonstrating how pre-trained AI provides findings that appear convincing but in effect lack situational and contextual understanding and depth. Indeed, AI relies on the data that has been used in its training. Our conclusions discuss how capitalism through AI aims for advanced forms of productivity and efficiency that pose new challenges to marketing as an embedded cultural practice. We offer some suggestions for ways macromarketing scholars can help overcome some of these challenges.

This perspective essay proposes Democracy Labs as new processes for developing democratic innovations that help tackle complex socio-ecological challenges within an increasingly unequal and polarised society, against the backdrop of democratic backsliding. Next to the current socio-ecological crisis, rapid technological innovations present both opportunities and challenges for democracy and call for democratic innovations. These innovations (e.g., mini-publics, collaborative governance and e-participation) offer alternative mechanisms for democratic participation and new forms of active citizenship, as well as new feedback mechanisms between citizens and traditional institutions of representative democracy. This essay thus introduces Democracy Labs, as citizen-centred processes for co-creating democratic innovations to inspire future transdisciplinary research and practice for a more inclusive and sustainable democracy. The approach is illustrated with examples from a Democracy Lab in Lisbon, reflecting on requirements for recruiting participants, the relevance of combining sensitising, reflection and ideation stages, and the importance of careful communication and facilitation processes guiding participants through co-creation activities.

Energy agendas in national parliaments are crucial when countries seek to develop their energy futures while adhering to international obligations. This article examines how energy agendas emerge and evolve in parliamentary debates using data from Finland over a period of 12 years. By relying on topic modelling, we can show how the key energy agendas relate to an overall energy solution, promoting domestic energy production and seeking carbon‐neutral energy, and how they evolve successively alongside general concerns for the country's task ahead in the field. Examining more detailed agendas, in turn, validates the first analysis and exposes some differences in the agendas of political parties. These differences were few. This further specifies the nature of Finnish energy politics, which is often considered consensual except for nuclear power and peat as sources of energy. The article demonstrates that scholars who examine parliamentary politics may benefit from the use of language‐based computational methodologies to uncover insights that have previously been difficult to attain.

Based on the recently published Springer book with the same title, the talk will involve a discussion by renowned well-being experts on the impact the pandemic has had on the health, safety, and socioeconomic well-being of communities around the world. The panelists will look at how community well-being has been impacted by the most significant crises of our time, the COVID-19 pandemic. Key takeaways from the discussion will be: lessons learned from the experiences in these countries and recommendations on mitigating the impact of future pandemics on the well-being of communities.