Creating a Brave New World : How AI Developers’ Imaginations of the Future Shape Their Work

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may change work, management, and societies in the future. This study questions how AI developers consider the potential consequences of their work. It proposes an imagined futures perspective to understand how AI developers imagine the futures associated with AI and how these imaginations shape their work and practices. It examines qualitatively the case of some AI developers and their work and find that they consider the future consequences of the AI they participate in developing as tangential – i.e., loosely connected to what they do - or integral – i.e., closely associated with what they do - to their work. These imaginations of the future are in tension, prompting some AI developers to work at connecting them as they adjust how they view the future and their work. This study adds to scholarship by revealing how AI development relies upon particular imaginations of the future, by illuminating how practitioners engage speculatively with the future, and by explaining the importance for Information Technology (IT) development of developers’ answers to what their work may do in the future.