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Short abstract:

Drawing on digital ethnographic research in Swedish municipalities, this paper shows how automation of public administration faces hurdles, blending old practices with tech ideals, leading to what is here referred to as click-level bureaucracy and duct-tape solutionism, delaying anticipated futures.

Long abstract:

Sweden is increasingly considering the possibility of automating public administration. Data-driven process automation is believed to help make administrative tasks more efficient and goal-driven. However, implementing these systems, or preparing for their implementation, involves a transformation in organisational practices and principles. These practices are adapted to imaginaries of automation technologies, often stemming from the digital industries. When the organisational logic of public administration clashes with the promises of emerging automation technologies, new organisational forms and temporalities take shape, here referred to as click-level bureaucracy and duct-tape solutionism.

Based on digital ethnographic research with stakeholders from approximately ten Swedish municipalities, this paper explores how these new organisational forms and temporalities take shape. Two central and interrelated ideas anchor this exploration. Firstly, the future will necessitate automation to prevent the public sector from collapsing as it is perceived as dysfunctional and in need of repair. Secondly, we must prepare for an automated future by transforming today's work forms and routines to be compatible with machine communication when needed.

The interaction between these two lines of thought reveals that preparations involve constant repair work, yet these efforts are rarely deemed satisfactory. Instead, they become temporary, makeshift solutions that continually defer the anticipated future. In this sense, repair becomes a form of future-making where the future is persistently delayed, making it a perpetually moving target while at the same time building up a new form of bureaucracy that requires novel competencies and forms of management that necessarily involves representation from the digital industries.

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Short abstract:

Journalists' understanding and use of AI shapes the news we receive. As embedded practitioner-researchers, we reflect on an action research project exploring journalists' imaginaries of AI and their implications for news work and generated interventions to build critical capacity in the newsroom.

Long abstract:

Journalists are dealing with rapid changes in the media and communication technologies they use for work, whilst having to simultaneously make sense of these technologies for audiences. As such, their imaginaries of AI and use of AI shape the news our societies receive. While generative AI and deepfakes make headlines, the incremental and ad-hoc instances of AI- and data-driven automation are quietly shifting the conditions within which news is produced. In this paper, we discuss an embedded action research project at public service broadcaster, the BBC. It explored newsworkers' understandings of AI but also aimed to intervene and engender change in the newsroom. Journalists held diverse and often ambivalent perspectives. Many reflected prevalent narratives about how AI-automated work processes could improve productivity and efficiency, be objective, and free up time from repetitive tasks for creative/investigative work but also make them redundant, introduce errors/biases, or lack empathetic and contextual qualities. A common thread was viewing AI as everywhere and nowhere – an invisible and inscrutable presence within core digital infrastructures, but which they couldn't pinpoint. The authors – a journalist and a research scientist at the BBC, who are also academic researchers - used participatory methods to co-design plausible futures and visual artefacts with which to interrogate professional implications of specific applications. We reflect on the benefits and shortcomings of this combination of etic and emic knowledge and argue for approaches that close the gap between theory, critique, and practice by having ‘skin in the game’ and making normative underpinnings explicit.

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This paper addresses the challenge of comprehending how individuals within the tech industry conceptualise the future of work. I discuss the diverse technologies and imaginative frameworks shaping future trajectories of tech work. While the tech industry wields significant influence in shaping societal perceptions of work futures through epic narratives and speculative visions, this paper argues that the reality of tech work is far more complex, dispersed across various contexts and abstract realms. Ethnographic studies have debunked the notion of a homogenous tech workforce, revealing diverse practices, ideologies, professions, and affiliations (Lanzeni, 2016). Contrary to media portrayals and academic assumptions, tech workers do not conform to a singular collective but a heterogeneous constellation of professional practices and unwitting work in many industries.

Drawing on the intersection of futures anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork with tech workers designing, developing and conceptualising IoT and GenAI Simulations tech in two different industries (tech and health) in Europe and Australia.

I advocate for a new understanding of 'future visions of work' grounded in the granularity of actual tech work. In doing so, I call for a focus on the work dynamics underlying the emergence of alternative future scenarios, fostering a deeper understanding of the effects of tech work on how society envisions the future of work. Further, I explore strategies for intervention in shaping the imaginative landscape of the tech industry.

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Long abstract:

The annual South-by-Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX, gathers technology experts, innovators, artists, and policymakers showcasing emerging trends in their fields. This event not only celebrates technological advancements and industry success but also embraces alternative, wellness-oriented paths, challenging the paradigms of tech-driven work practices with experiences that include psychedelic exploration, immersive technologies used for aesthetic purposes, and other sensory practices. This juxtaposition reflects a broader tension: the allure of progress versus a growing concern over unsustainable work models accentuated by the rise of generative AI and new digital workflows.

This study employs a mixed-method approach, including digital and sensory ethnography, to analyze SXSW's 2022, 2023, and 2024 editions. It considers SXSW’s impact on reshaping work culture by fostering social innovation and lifestyle experimentation. The research captures how SXSW has become a tastemaker for reimagining work-life narratives that prioritize sensory and embodied experiences, countering the prevailing digital monotony.

SXSW's dual focus creates a dynamic dialogue between the excitement for digital futures and a critical view that questions the sustainability of such futures, underscoring the need for well-being and genuine human connections. Through its findings, this paper contributes to the discourse on the future of work by highlighting narratives around human-centric digital work environments.

The paper studies these alternative future projections in which innovation is harmonized with our innate need for wellness and purpose where technology serves to enhance, rather than dictate, the contours of our lives.

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Long abstract:

Fact checkers have always been a relatively technologically savvy professional group within journalism. Now, they are standing at the forefront of the efforts to infuse AI into their work.

The talk is based on 3 years of field work and interviews with fact checkers around the world who take part in building tools to automate their work. Differently from doomsday scenarios of “robots stealing our jobs”, fact checkers mostly accept and welcome automation of what they see as boring and repetitive tasks, in favor of providing them with more time to engage in difficult tasks that they do not want machines to conduct.

These encounters draw the lines of what they see as inherently human and intellectually stimulating tasks, that must remain explainable and transparent, and what they see as a waste of human capacities, thus reshaping the boundaries between human and machine in journalistic work.

In addition, if so far in journalism mostly audience behaviour was datafied, automation of fact checking takes the datafication to a new realm - the journalistic work routines. The automation is based on training data that is the result of fact checkers past work, and at the same time building an automated tool provides a framework for capturing future actions - their outputs, what they write, link, search and decide - and turning them into training data. The machine learning tools built by them help exacerbate the datafication and deepen it.

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Long abstract:

Emotions have recently become a topic in the critical studies of technology and AI (Ruckenstein 2013, Arnelid, Johnson, Harrison 2022, Su et. al 2021). My research continues this exploration, focusing on the connection between emotions and reasoning around ethical responsibility in technology practitioners' work. I start from the assumption that workplaces are the sites of disciplining, where specific emotional regimes (Reddy 1997) are instilled and sustained to restrict the display of certain emotions in favour of others, e.g. happiness instead of anger. Through a series of interviews with software developers, designers and engineers, engaged in the development of AI-based technology, I examine differences between workplace regimes and their relation to the practitioners reasoning around their moral responsibility. I approach emotions as shared collective phenomena that co-create social categorizations (Ahmed 2004). In my presentation, I will examine how the absence of negative emotions is produced, talk about the specifics of data collection, and present the theoretical underpinnings of this exploration, looking at the connection between emotions as individual mental states, ‘emotional regimes’ of workplaces, and technology practitioners’ reasoning about ethics and moral responsibility.

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Our contribution addresses a puzzle: that recent adoptions of AI applications in the Swiss library field seem to contradict the century-long vision for knowledge organization in academic librarianship. We propose an ecological perspective (Abbott 2005) that follows the changing alliances between various professional and organizational actors over time to understand these surprisingly uncontested adoptions.

In our analysis, we draw on our ongoing research on the platformization of the Swiss library ecology. Specifically, we focus on the adoption of two AI applications by external providers in the cloud-based national search portal used by over 500 libraries.

We start by exemplifying how the mode of ordering knowledge embodied by these AI tools diverges by several dimensions (imagined primary user, presentation of the factuality of results, used sources of data) from the traditional project of librarians, which is the provision of access to universal “knowledge-from-nowhere” (Abbott 2011). We then show how the changing alliances between librarians, libraries, library networks, IT providers and publishers over time holds answers as to why the two AI applications now appear notwithstanding as the right tools for the job. Following different actors in the process of platformization, it appears that the adoption of these tools succeeded not despite, but rather because of rather different understandings of the problems they ought to solve. In this vein, we also argue that an ecological lens, accentuating the historical roots of imaginaries and important power relations, bears great potential to enrich the broader research agenda of rehumanising automation (Pink et al. 2022).

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Long abstract:

This paper will explore how artificial intelligence is used and imagined by creative-intellectual workers in the Canadian Visual Effects industry. Canadian VFX can be situated within the post-Fordist “knowledge economy” (Powell and Snellman 2004). Contemporary VFX is characterized by outsourced, globalized supply chain labour wherein workers from different companies collaborate on sequences through a geographically-dispersed digital pipeline. In this context, Canadian governmental and educational strategies have worked to position the cities Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver as "centers of transnational production" (Curtin and Sanson 2017), and their workers’ skills as national resource.

Although AI has been part of VFX software for some time, industry discourse has begun to more extensively report and problematize its rapid integration into creative processes. While some fear an intelligence supplanting workers who trade specifically on their knowledge, in a field already marked by precarity, others are optimistic, focusing on how AI will allow workers to focus on “creative”, rather than "laborious" tasks. I will account for how AI is being integrated into VFX practice in ways that may extend or alter earlier applications, combining theories of embodied knowledge and skilled craft from performance and anthropology with software studies accounts of the interface as process (Galloway 2012) and the "unknowability" of algorithms (Bucher 2016) to complexify understandings of human-computer interaction in this creative industry. Secondly, I will address how workers’ experience of AI is framed by industry rhetoric, drawing on production culture studies theories of how industry discourse reflexively narrativizes and mediates knowledge about itself (Caldwell 2008).

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Long abstract:

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) marks a crucial turning point in the history of intelligent agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, which rely on knowledge bases and natural language processing algorithms to respond to queries, generative artificial intelligence is able to generate original content and produce responses that are not pre-programmed. These Ais are packaged as freemium-accessible platforms, which make them accessible to a wider public. To investigate the applications of Gen AI in professional settings, particularly in content creation, we conducted a qualitative study with several early adopters. Our research discovered that people are using Gen AI in early ways, which we call "proto-uses." In these instances, individuals are using Gen AI to make tasks easier or to help with things they're not very skilled at. These proto-uses reflect an exploratory phase, treating AI as guides or assistants, but some, like employing ChatGPT as a comprehensive search engine or writer, are met with skepticism. However, deploying generative AIs in traditionally skilled tasks raises concerns about digital skills and the exacerbation of the digital divide. Understanding algorithmic comprehension, coding logic, and assessing machine agency are pivotal in this context. Therefore, it is crucial to keep observing the emerging usage practices of Gen AIs in the workplace, considering their implications for work activities. The deployment of generative AIs in tasks traditionally assigned to skilled professions raises questions about digital skills (Bancal & Dobaire, 2022), bringing to the forefront the longstanding issue of the digital divide (Beauchamps, 2009). This becomes particularly evident when examining aspects such as algorithmic comprehension, the logic of code (Canivenc, 2022), and the assessment of machine agency (capabilities beyond the superficial appearance of information). Consequently, it is imperative to scrutinize the emergence of usage practices of Gen AIs in the workplace, considering their implications for work activities. This inquiry follows the framework established by Sophie Bernard's work (Bernard, 2014) on the reconfigurations of professions in the context of automated machines. The aim of this study is therefore to continue discussions on the first uses of generative AI in the workplace.