Forward Assessment
An utterance that attempts to anticipate how the human-AI relationship will develop while explicitly acknowledging the uncertainty of any such forecast. The referent is the hedged, future-oriented assessment act; the surrounding lexicon documents the present rather than predicting it.
Operational Definition
EVENT. One occurrence is recorded when a discourse segment makes an explicit claim about the future state of human-AI interaction accompanied by an epistemic hedge marking its uncertainty (e.g. 'may', 'could', 'it is hard to say'). The observable markers are co-present future-time reference and uncertainty hedging within the same segment.
Measurement Schema
Proposed measurement protocol (not yet empirically validated): Discourse coding for hedged future-oriented statements: text segments are annotated for future-time reference and for epistemic-hedge markers; an instance requires both. Could be reported as the rate of hedged forecasts per 1000 words and the proportion of future-claims that carry a hedge (a calibration-of-uncertainty indicator). Annotation reliability via Cohen's kappa on a double-coded subset.