In the bustling town of Mala, nestled under the watchful eye of Lima's skyline, a transformative journey unfolded at our recent workshop, "Futuros del Parto" (or: Birth Futures) in April 2024. As one of the pillars of the Birth Futures project, our goal for this workshop was clear: to revolutionize healthcare innovation in birth care through social dreaming.

On May 11 the first workshop Birth Futures took place in Utrecht (the Netherlands).

Although not a complete monolith, the future of birth is distinctly western-oriented, and firmly rooted in the juxtoposition of humans against nature, and nature against tech. That’s my experience using the GPT-4 based future scenario maker of the Board of Innovation.

What happens if you prompt AI to dream up images of birth futures? Will they be utopic, dystopic? Familiar or unrecognizable? A short experiment.