Anticipating Artificial Intelligence: How Workers Strive to Reshape the Future of Work

Existing research suggests that when new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems do not serve workers’ interests, they react by ‘gaming’ the system, devising workarounds, or engaging in more overt resistance. Much of this research explores workers’ reactions once they are directly confronted with the consequences of such technology. However, given that much of the discourse on new technologies includes speculations about the future, we need a better understanding of how workers anticipate and prepare for the implications of new technologies in the workplace. Drawing on qualitative data, spanning four years and multiple organizations, our study examines collective worker efforts to anticipate and reshape the potential implications of AI in the workplace. While workers viewed AI technologies as a possible threat, we did not find that their responses were focused on resistance as current literature would predict. Instead, we uncover four future-making activities workers engage in: building capacity, shaping narratives, anticipatory experimentation, and setting guardrails. Leveraging insights from the future-making literature, we theorize how workers engage in these activities in a cumulative effort to steer new AI technologies towards desirable futurescapes that provide workers beneficial outcomes in the long term. These workers attempt to reshape the trajectory of a potentially threatening technology by engaging with organizational futures, which we conceptualize as the future-making of work. In so doing, they both enable desirable and mitigate undesirable futurescapes.