The Stories We Govern By: AI, Risk, and the Power of Imaginaries
It addresses the problem of speculative dogmatism in AI governance for policymakers and scholars, advocating for pragmatic regulatory strategies, but it is incremental in applying existing concepts from science and technology studies.
This paper analyzes how three competing sociotechnical imaginaries of AI risk—existential risk, accelerationism, and critical AI—influence governance decisions by embedding distinct assumptions about risk, potentially narrowing policy options.
This paper examines how competing sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) risk shape governance decisions and regulatory constraints. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, we analyse three dominant narrative groups: existential risk proponents, who emphasise catastrophic AGI scenarios; accelerationists, who portray AI as a transformative force to be unleashed; and critical AI scholars, who foreground present-day harms rooted in systemic inequality. Through an analysis of representative manifesto-style texts, we explore how these imaginaries differ across four dimensions: normative visions of the future, diagnoses of the present social order, views on science and technology, and perceived human agency in managing AI risks. Our findings reveal how these narratives embed distinct assumptions about risk and have the potential to progress into policy-making processes by narrowing the space for alternative governance approaches. We argue against speculative dogmatism and for moving beyond deterministic imaginaries toward regulatory strategies that are grounded in pragmatism.