Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Laura Kunz
(University of Graz)
Jana Heim (Weizenbaum Institute Berlin, WZB Berlin Social Science Center)
Daniel Schneiß (Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin Kiel University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Recognising that AI comes with its own particular future-oriented epistemology, this panel explores how the epistemology of AI is changing work and workers’ agency, and asks how work can be studied in STS and collaboratively ‘futured’ in an AI-driven world.
Description
‘Nothing comes without its world’ (de la Bellacasa, 2012) — neither does AI. While STS has by now acknowledged the need to interrogate the work that maintains digitalisation, datafication and functionalities of AI (Sambasivan et al., 2021), which is often made invisible, we have not yet asked how the epistemological framework that AI comes with is changing how labour is approached. Acknowledging that AI is a non-neutral technology impacting the future of work requires us to take this epistemological framework seriously, i.e., how it promotes a view on the world that causes a narrowing down of others. After all, AI systems establish a ‘world model’ (Amoore, 2024), follow productivity and efficiency criteria, and often boil down to single-parameter optimisation and prediction approaches focusing on monetarily measured efficacy (Kasy, in press; McQuillan, 2022).
With this panel, we thus want to interrogate how the implementation of AI changes the approach to work practices, work organisation and labour relations when guided by these epistemologies. This also includes examining the work of integrating, infrastructuring, adapting, repairing, and evaluating AI systems.
We welcome contributions, both empirical and conceptual, that look into:
- How (the epistemology of) AI is changing work processes, work organisation, labour relations, and the epistemic agency of workers?
- What kinds of reconfigurations, frictions, and compromises between professional values, organisational logics, and epistemic logics of AI arise?
- What constitutes meaningful futures of working with(out) AI and how can they be collaboratively futured?
We are also interested in the tools and perspectives offered by STS to interrogate work as a sociotechnical phenomenon that co-shapes society and the economy in the future, foregrounding work as a research area in STS.