Taina Bucher (University of Oslo): Tech Transitions - Presenting AI: Slowing down the future

AI promises speed, efficiency, and seamless automation, yet in pursuing these ideals, we risk marginalizing practices and temporalities that matter: slowness, reflection, imperfection, and the capacity to linger. This talk reframes the conversation about AI futures by focusing not only on what is to come, but on what we risk losing in the process. Rather than treating AI as inevitable progress, it asks: what forms of life are foreclosed when optimization becomes the dominant value? Drawing on concepts from critical theory and speculative futures studies, the talk examines practices, temporalities, and ways of being that are being sidelined. It considers what it means for societies to remain hospitable to experiences that do not easily conform to the logic of automation, not as nostalgic retreat, but as asserting the right to exist in ways that exceed AI’s narrow script.

Taina Bucher is Professor and Head of Research in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Oslo. She currently leads HumAIn, a humanities-based research hub focused on the reimagination of AI, and is involved in several funded projects on AI, imaginaries, and opinion formation. She also heads a research project on the democratic potentials of silence and leads the Norwegian AI Research School for Humanities and Society. Her research explores the social and cultural imaginaries of algorithms and AI, and she has published widely on these topics, including her books IF…THEN: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Facebook (Polity Press, 2021).