AI and Imagined Futures: Sociological Approaches to Expectations and the Politics of Promise

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful site of future-making and speculation, generating expectations and anxieties about impending social transformations. Across domains such as labour, education, health, and environment, AI is increasingly invoked as a solution to contemporary challenges and a catalyst for societal change. Governments and companies promote AI as a means of addressing issues ranging from healthcare provision to climate change, while critics question the feasibility of such promises and the socioecological costs they may obscure.

This session examines future imaginaries surrounding AI and their social implications. Drawing on the sociology of expectations (Beckert, 2016), we explore how visions of AI-driven futures shape present-day decisions, practices, policies as well as cycles of hope and disillusionment. As such, we focus on how AI imaginaries are constructed, circulated, legitimised, and contested by governments, corporations, communities, and citizens alike.

We invite papers that critically investigate how promissory discourses of efficiency and innovation intersect with inequalities and power relations. Contributions that foreground AI’s environmental costs (e.g., energy consumption, water use, material extraction, infrastructure demands) are especially welcome as a counterpoint to narratives that render such consequences invisible. More broadly, we seek contributions that examine the promises and the intended and unintended consequences of AI futures, asking whose visions come to dominate and with what effects.

We also welcome methodological contributions that advance the study of imaginaries, anticipatory practices, policy discourses, and everyday engagements with AI, including participatory and civic approaches that expand understandings of AI futures through diverse voices and perspectives.