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New Publication Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp – The imaginative landscape of AI: Locating Silicon Valley’s “quiet futuring”

As part of the ComAI Project P1 “Pioneer Communities: Imagining ComAI and its Possible Futures”, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp has published the article “The Imaginative Landscape of AI: Locating Silicon Valley’s ‘quiet futuring’” in the Media, Culture & Society Journal. The article is open-access and is freely available to everyone.

The article’s key arguments are:

1. Analyses of AI power geometries have so far predominantly focused on the perspectives of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech and its “loud futuring” of AI. However, for comprehending Silicon Valley’s imaginaries surrounding AI, an analysis of the “quiet futuring” of AI-related groups and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area is equally essential because they are an integral part of its imaginative landscape of AI.

2. Silicon Valley’s imaginative landscape of AI is anchored in appropriated places, constructed within specific social figurations, and characterized by distinct discursive thickenings. Although this landscape may at first appear fragmented or even contradictory, taken together, it forms a coherent “quiet futuring” of AI.

3. The associated visions extend beyond the technology itself, focusing instead on the potential futures it presents. Three themes dominate these visions: the possible futures of AGI, the possible futures of job loss, and the possible futures of AI geopolitics.

Learn more in the full article.