ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURES TURN: an anticipatory infrastructure for qualitative methods

Abstract

In this article, I focus on artificial intelligence (AI) in a social science futures research agenda. This agenda is proposed in response to a contemporary context where global future uncertainties are generating a futures knowledge market increasingly populated by the promise of faster and scaled-up AI foresight. Acknowledging the possibilities offered by technological and interactional focuses in developing AI methods, I turn to reflexively discuss the “side effects” of using AI methods in qualitative futures-focused team research. Bringing this perspective together with those of AI foresighting and technical elements of AI methods, I examine the role of Generative AI (Gen AI) and AI as an anticipatory infrastructure through which international organizations imagine possible futures and possible foresight solutions; research participants can critically engage with dominant futures visions; and researchers imagine future research methods and their applications in the social sciences.