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Taina Bucher at the ComAI Lectures – Beyond the Seamless Future of AI

On 25 November 2025, Prof. Dr. Taina Bucher (University of Oslo) visited ZeMKI as part of the ComAI Lectures. In her talk “Presenting AI: Slowing Down the Future”, she asked what gets lost when AI is imagined primarily as the engine of an ever faster, more efficient, and more “seamless” future: What disappears when everything runs too smoothly?

Bucher argued that dominant AI futures—circulated most visibly through marketing-driven hype—are largely built around ideals of optimisation: acceleration, automation, continual improvement. Yet these ideals marginalise those human practices and temporalities that rely on slowness, interruption, imperfection and openness. Thinking about the future of AI, she suggested, requires not only asking what is coming, but also what might vanish when forms of life that do not easily align with logics of automation are pushed aside.

To make such alternative presents visible, Bucher developed three conceptual figures that invite us to think beyond dominant narratives of AI

• The Clunky – the awkward, imperfect, unelegant. This figure highlights aspects of everyday life that do not function efficiently or smoothly—and precisely for that reason create room for creativity, the unexpected, and social negotiation. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s figure of the Walker, who moves through the city not efficiently but experimentally, with detours and improvisation, Bucher showed how “clunkiness” keeps open spaces for deviation and imagination.

• The Crack – the rupture, the interruption, the friction. These are the small disturbances that unsettle routines and open moments of reflection. In fully automated worlds, such frictions tend to disappear—along with important opportunities for critique and change. Bucher connected this figure to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the Wayward, forms of life lived “between the norms” that open cracks in the social order and make alternatives perceptible.

• The Chill – the slowed, the open-ended, the non-urgent. This figure underscores temporalities that do not conform to efficiency, but instead value presence, quiet, and ambiguity. “Chill” articulates a posture that does not compete with acceleration but reveals other rhythms. Bucher linked this to Dostoevsky’s Idiot, who quietly refuses the competitive, optimising logic of the world around him. “Chill” thus gestures towards forms of existence oriented not by speed, but by openness and attentiveness.

Taken together, these three figures offer a way of imagining presents not dominated by automation and optimisation. They encourage us to protect spaces where the unpolished, the incomplete and the resistant can endure—spaces that allow for forms of life that do not run smoothly, and perhaps precisely for that reason matter most.