Visions of Innovation: Expertise, Ethics, and Imagined AI Futures

Abstract

This thesis asks how people imagine, understand, and reason ethically about AI from the specific positions they occupy. It draws on ethnographic interviews with five interlocutors whose disciplinary training and institutional locations differ sharply, and it argues that AI is universally experienced as inevitable but never universally understood. That gap, between a shared sense of inevitability and partial understanding, is produced by three structural conditions that reinforce one another. The first is an inevitability imaginary, in which the direction of the future feels already decided even though its form remains unknown. The second is a layered opacity, in which each interlocutor sees only the part of AI their position makes visible, so no one assembles a full picture. The third is an ethical displacement, in which responsibility moves between individuals, corporations, and the future itself, never settling in a place where it can be held. Together these conditions produce what this thesis calls a speculative condition. People do not deliberate about AI. They speculate about it, and the quality of their speculation depends on the resources their position gives them. Existing AI ethics frameworks assume a coherent technology and a shared public, but the ethnographic evidence shows neither exists. The contribution of this thesis is to show that the conditions under which people encounter AI are themselves the finding.