Artificially Intelligent Futures: Technology, the Changing Nature of Work, and Organizing

Though beginning with deterministic views on how technologies affect organizations, organizational scholars have made significant progress since, providing a variety of nuanced frameworks by which to understand disruptive workplace technologies - such as AI - and what effects they may have. However, lessons learned about technology and organizing in the literature’s development seem to have been lost in today’s discourse on AI. For instance, Collins (2018) bemoans the state of this discourse, noting our tendency to view this technology deterministically: an unstoppable force which will consume everything in its path. Our symposium is an attempt at re-orienting the emerging literature on AI and their effect on work and organizing. It aims at leaving determinism behind to instead uncover the complex negotiations – among humans and between the social and technical – which both shape and are shaped by AI, and the consequences of such negotiations for AI’s development and use. It does so by drawing on and comparing across four ethnographic studies on AI from the very edge of the future of work: a response to scholars’ concern that “discourse on the topic is largely speculative, focusing on the possibilities” (Brayne 2017: 977) rather than grounded in what has actually been going on (see also Barley and Kunda 2001; Bechky 2011). Doubting the Diagnosis: Using AI when Forming Critical Professional Judgments Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia “It’s Like Being in the Future” vs. “It’s a Joke”: Divergent Interpretations of Facial Recognition Presenter: Elizabeth Anne Watkins; Columbia U. Augmenting or Automating? Breathing Life into the Promise of Artificial Intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. The Interpretation of Machine-Learning Technologies in Organizations Presenter: Katherine C. Kellogg; MIT