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Paper short abstract

This ethnography examines healthcare workers' imagined futures amid AI adoption in Australian hospitals. Developing 'daydreaming' as a conceptual device, it shows how workers articulate alternative work futures beyond polarised tech narratives, opening plural possibilities centred on care.

Paper long abstract

How do healthcare workers envision the transformation of their working lives amidst AI adoption in Australian hospitals? Whilst much scholarly attention examines how tech entrepreneurs articulate technology market dreams and nightmares, health-tech narratives of universal efficiency often rely on fictional expectations that obscure real-world clinical complexity. Drawing on futures anthropology and STS, this ethnographic research in a regional hospital examines how healthcare workers navigate professional uncertainties regarding not only technology, but what constitutes valued care, skill, and jobs. Central to this inquiry is the concept of daydreaming—developed from participants' accounts of daydreaming during work—as a device for understanding future-making. These workplace daydreams critically engage with technological hype, media imagery, and institutional ambitions. Healthcare practitioners, I argue, experience a fundamental divergence between their envisioned professional futures as workers and the technological transformation of work itself, a gap demanding scholarly attention to how technology is differently imagined across these domains. Neither utopian nor dystopian, daydreams function as imaginative techniques articulating alternative futures centred on inclusive care access, positioning healthcare workers as key agents mobilising technology for public good. Examining this divergence reveals pathways for reconciling these visions, thereby reorienting debates beyond binary tech narratives toward the contested, experiential dimensions of labour in plural, contingent technological work futures. Ultimately, attending to workers' daydreams contributes to engaged anthropological approaches that actively participate in shaping more liveable technological futures.