Short abstract:

The EU AI Act is nearly there, but AI is far from being off the tables of public debate or policymakers. Drawing on data around the desirable approaches to the future governance of AI in the EU, this article investigates the multiple and contested socio-technical imaginaries of EU policy experts.

Long abstract:

Recent years have seen an accelerated proliferation of guidelines for policy and governance from the OECD and UNESCO to varied national approaches. For example China, India, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union have all taken strides in setting national policy frameworks to both curb purported risks but also gain ground in “the global AI race”. What is striking about these varied approaches is that they are an amalgamation of policy and discourse (Bareis & Katzenbach, 2021) – a coproduction of imaginaries, narrative construction and governance.

At the same time, the socio-technical imaginaries (STIs) reflected within these approaches are not fully stabilized singular monoliths. This article takes as its starting point the continuing multiple and contested STIs (Mager & Katzenbach, 2021) within EU policy circles around artificial intelligence. The aim is to explore and conceptualize the multiple imaginaries at play in EU policy circles at a time where a key institutional milestone, the EU AI Act, has been achieved but there are still uncertainties and gaps as to what future governance of artificial intelligence within the EU should look like. Combining a theoretical lens of STIs and the sociology of expectations (Borup et al 2006; Brown and Michael 2003), I draw on a two-round Delphi survey for EU policy experts to interrogate the imaginaries and expectations of AI, highlighting the tensions between European “technological sovereignty”, the desire for AI to be aligned with European democratic values, the democratic governance of technologies and the desire for competitiveness.