In this text, any resemblance to future persons or institutions is not coincidental.

On 1st January 2102, to mark the CERI’s 150^th anniversary, its new premises were unveiled with great pomp. The handpicked select few on the guest list were most impressed by the minimalism of this beautiful and deliberately reduced space. Its unprecedented topology is the result of the most recent major redevelopment project that took place in spring 2099. Having exhausted all the possibilities for expanding in Paris-des-Près (formerly the capital’s 6^th and 7^th arrondissements), and with the rooftops and cellars of certain buildings already having been saturated, Sciences Po scoured all five continents, implanting local CERI branches. Its latest initiative saw the launch of several floating campuses just off the Breton coast, where decentred-centres found a place for themselves. Magnified by this victory over the urban and the mineral, and proud of this profitable accommodation with nature (a project resulting from the joint efforts of the CNRS and the foundation run by Elon Musk’s grandchildren), the CERI entered the twenty-second-century world of research with its head held high.

Floating wind turbines sporting the school’s colours on their blades are another source of prestige for the CERI. It is true that a couple of trawlers from Finistère Sud mistook them for Russian helicopters and some inebriated sailors took the fox and the lion for marine monsters, but these were just minor details and ultimately no great problem. Of course, there was also the small matter of swallowing the bitter pill that was the failure of the submarine research centre submerged off the Normandy coast (and in which leaks appeared very shortly after it was put into service). It is therefore with great relief and immense satisfaction that our whole community welcomes the success of these new enhanced premises. Moreover, today, our beautiful Rue des Saint·es Pères/Mères—so rechristened in the name of gender equality and now skilfully pedestrianized and duly vegetated—teems with the holograms of CERI correspondents, both maritime and terrestrial.

This day of celebration is also an opportunity for our centre to take stock of the research field defined in 2082 when the CERI invested massively in Robotic Studies at the instigation of Sciences Po. This initiative profoundly modified the centre’s activities, just as contracts with defence programmes and the service and Internet industries transformed its members’ work. Research on the use of robots in armed conflicts also took off following China’s intervention in Taiwan in 2049 during which the PRC used amphibious Russian robots which landed on the island (they were then dismembered by Taiwanese forces who recovered their chips, even as some of them, faced with this threat, offered up compromising details about China’s military programmes).

Shortly after, with a view to parity, a programme on gender, robotics, and identity (ROBID) was awarded a prize by the consortium of which Sciences Po is a founding member and which brings together Californian, Ukrainian, Swiss, and Norwegian universities. The programme distinguished itself by its in-depth field studies on intra-marital violence between humans and non-humans in Mali, Guatemala, and Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, it had to be shut down following disagreement between the main leaders of the study over the contentious issue of the robots’ gender identity and their obligation to wear the veil. Those who rejected binarity came into conflict with those who defended a veiled and gendered approach to robots. It was no easy task, but, after this deep immersion in the field, the machines had to be unplugged. The operation initially sparked real concerns among human colleagues but they were soon reassured by the announcement of a new committee on care and intersectionality tasked with reducing the effects of the non-human colleagues’ fear of abandonment before the operation (see Darwish and Gordon, 2097).

Artificial intelligence has also made a profound impact on the CERI’s administrative and teaching activities ever since the centre took in dozens of Indian computer scientists as a result of the war that broke out between India and China in 2090. Hosted in the offices on the top floor of the Paris-des-Près buildings (which their local colleagues had refused, considering the height of the ceilings and the distance from the coffee machine to be a source of humiliation), these Karnatakan engineers built machines that produced astonishing results. The robots now conduct fieldwork in difficult locations (although the CNRS is reluctant to issue mission orders in areas where access to local electricity is unreliable). After the first non-human visas were issued, members of the CERI sent robots to conduct research for them in Iran (where, in 2089, the Islamists took back power from the liberal, feminist, non-binary government that had replaced the old regime in 2043 only finally to bring despair to all those who had placed their modernizing hopes in it).

This has also been an opportunity to give a new lease of life to our community’s administrative activities. CERI members now send their own avatars to meetings and the centre’s main actors are robots, something in which the vast majority of the human members can only take pride. It should be noted that non-human administrative meetings are no more boring than those that were held in the era of human management (robots are particularly resilient and never fall asleep). Before each assemblée générale or general meeting (use of the acronym ‘AG’ has been prohibited in messages as part of the new policy to fight meetingitis; the same is true of the term ‘research lab’, which doesn’t make it past the automatic spellcheckers), simulations are carried out to establish its relevance (there is no denying that this has led to a marked drop in the number of meetings).

Obviously, the CERI now has a PhD programme for robots; the reservations expressed at the last human ‘AG’ in November 2075 were soon forgotten and the robots all finish their theses in 2 years and 364 days. In the name of doing away with all discrimination between humans and non-humans, and after an anti-speciesist campaign, ‘blind testing’ has been implemented in PhD vivas (examiners do not seek to find out the candidate’s identity or cognitive species). ‘Deadnaming’ has also been prohibited for robots who have transitioned to a new gender.

As the first robotic chairs made their appearance in Kentucky, Singapore, Riyadh, and Dubai, Sciences Po also appointed non-humans in the Defence and Diplomacy research division. These appointments have yielded decidedly mixed results despite the fact that this new academic policy was suggested by the consultancy firm McDonald-Booz-Ferguson that specializes in the role of AI in academia. However, one incident marred this collaboration and cast doubt upon the service provided. Sciences Po robots were tasked with an initial reading of the interactive document produced and recognized the work of some much less effective cousins. In the end, the consultancy firm waived its human clients’ fees, especially since another discovery was made at one of its partner think tanks, the Institut Pascal, where binary female robots were given energy copiously laced with MDMA (the investigation is on-going, but it seems that the human director of the organization was himself under the influence of non-synthetic Bolivian substances).

Following this unfortunate incident, cracks began to appear in an otherwise ever more featureless academic landscape. A doubt emerged in the non-human community, with some of their representatives declaring their dissatisfaction with their social construction. One of the programmers had inadvertently activated the ‘critical theory’ function, which sparked an attack by post-modern robots against their liberal counterparts. Bitter struggles ensued, with each camp trying to enter the other’s systems (‘knowledge is power’) and sending pastiche academic articles to the non-binary and non-human-centric peer review boards of several journals in the research community. Certain publications, which had accepted fake articles about the need to sequester human subjects in order to investigate systematic rape culture in mixed and non-racialized scout camps that had gone beyond the human/non-human barrier, were forced to close down.

In reaction to these unprecedented directions taken by academic life, a new turning point was reached at the end of the last millennium. Science Po’s governing bodies forced through a new series of directives marginalizing the place of robots in the New Board of Directors (which is, under no circumstances, referred to as the NBD). Henceforth personae non-gratae, the robots drew the logical conclusions and, since they could now feel emotions, became crippled with shame and deliberately unplugged themselves (this digital seppuku was followed by a moving ceremony). A vast policy to rehumanize research was then launched. The political humanities programme, which had appeared at the beginning of the century and then become obsolete around 2050 (after its first writing prize was awarded to a female robot), was given new funding at the beginning of the 2095 academic year.

The CERI now welcomes cosmopolitan writers-in-residence on its new aquatic campuses and a series of conferences have been organized on the topic of the novel and the social sciences. This is a topic that has been debated throughout the CERI’s history and so it affords an opportunity to launch a new cross-cutting theme based on the tension between universalism and relativism. Recently, for the inauguration of the Rorty Chair, a ceremony welcomed authors who read the texts they had written in their floating capsules. One candidate in the cohort distinguished himself, namely the young Marcello Proustovic, an associate member of the CERI from the Norman island of Balbec (this libertarian haven just off the coast of Deauville declared its independence in 2075). His text, turned into images by robot assistants who transformed it into an interactive audio-visual document, takes you back in time to paddle along the Orinoco with Lévi-Strauss. You have the choice between a universalist and a relativist avatar and you are free to participate in the expedition and frequent the cafés of the old Paris-des-Près neighbourhood where your avatar smokes like a chimney while reciting Nietzsche (season 2 also features an existentialist cannibal and a vegan shaman). So if God is dead is your mantra, universalism is out for the count. Incidentally, in the final chapter ‘Universalism Regained’, the assembly constituted by the community of Proustovic’s readers voted in favour of a universalist law that comes out against intrusive and non-reversible practices on human and non-human bodies (robots had waited a long time for such universal recognition of their rights).

As we can see, in the world of knowledge, the ‘content of the form’ (White, 1974) has undergone profound change. Videos now play a dominant role on the new social network for the sciences (the website Academia.edu was bought by the children of Russian oligarchs hoping to lift some of the stigma weighing upon their family—a family that had already tried to host on its yachts a research division focusing on improving the moral standards of capitalism; the CERI refused, but nonetheless agreed to let them pay for some recyclable blades for its wind turbines). Discussion groups have turned into groups of cinematographic expression and, quite naturally, an Images and Documentaries research field was created at the CERI. In a logical continuation of this shift, the faculty appointed after 1^st January 2091 have been required to provide a video summary of their research validated by Sciences Po’s cinema school which opened its doors in 2070 (a joint degree with the FEMIS was set up the same year).

In a curious feedback effect, this fresh perspective on artistic creation brings us closer to science once again, just as science is helping us to rediscover the importance of humour as an emotion and a primordial feeling. In 2091, at the grand old age of 120, the actor Sacha Baron-Cohen was master of ceremonies at the most recent graduation ceremony (87 years after his legendary commencement speech at Harvard in 2004). Baron Cohen, the recipient of a Nobel Prize in Laughter, is a living illustration of the results of a rising number of studies at the intersection of neuroscience, biology, and epidemiology showing that laughter plays a causal role in human longevity. Humans who laugh more than an hour a day live longer in good health than their more serious counterparts. The same correlation has also been observed in non-humans. It is following these discoveries that the now defunct ‘research centre committee meetings’, adjudged toxic, were definitely abolished and new marine capsules had to be found for the centenarian emeritus professors who retired after their 242^nd term in public service. Baron Cohen was also given an award for his role in a dystopia in which Michel Foucault did not die of AIDS in 1984 and so witnessed the 9/11 attacks when, that very morning, to mark his being awarded an honorary doctorate by NYU, he was presenting an article entitled ‘The Airport as New Chronic Heterotopia’, which has since become all the rage.

The year’s celebrations were brought to a close with a competition for epistemic jokes, which saw a long session devoted to parodies of paradigms, research centre board meetings, and research seminars. There were a great many candidates, both voluntary and (above all) involuntary, and the list of winners is nowhere to be found in the centre’s archives: we’re still looking…

Translated from the French by Lucy Garnier.