About The Episode

I’m happy to bring on Dhoya Snijders and Serf Doesborgh, two researchers from the Rathenau institute in the Netherlands. If you haven’t heard about this institute before we do go into it during the podcast but briefly it is an organisation that conducts research on the socially relevant aspects of science and technology, which is used to inform both the Dutch government and the general public on the pressing technological impacts of our current times. 

On the podcast today, the impacts of Virtual reality (mostly tackled by Dhoya) and Augmented reality (mostly tackled by Serf) are explored as we are seeing a boom in the use of these technologies in the last several years. 

About The Guests

Dhoya Snijders examines the effects of information technology on society. He is currently doing research on surveillance technology, the ethics of augmented and virtual reality and societal questions concerning radioactive waste projects. His doctoral research at the VU was about the social consequences of environmental policy and was carried out in both the Netherlands and South Africa. After working as a consultant on digital transformation he was employed by the Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT) and wrote, among other things, the publications ‘Data is power. Big Data Scenarios’ and ‘Long Live Learning. About Learning, Technology and the Future’.

Get in touch with Dhoya: https://www.rathenau.nl/en/about-us/who-we-are/our-staff/dr-dhoya-snijder

Serf Doesborgh is working on the theme digital society and focuses on societal issues regarding virtual / augmented reality and voice assistants. During his Master European Studies on Society, Science and Technology (ESST) he explored the societal issues regarding the automation of labour, which was actually where we met as our thesis overlapped in a number of areas.

Get in touch with Serf:
https://www.rathenau.nl/en/about-us/who-we-are/our-staff/serf-doesborgh-ma

I’ve had a number of guests come on to discuss the future of VR, but I especially looked forward to this discussion as we were able to really look at some of the societal impacts of these emerging technologies.  

Additional Notes:

Rathenau Institute’s Report on VR: https://www.rathenau.nl/en/digital-society/protect-consumers-virtual-reality
Rathenau Institute’s Manifesto on digital technologies: https://www.rathenau.nl/en/manifest

EPTA Network: https://eptanetwork.org/