Technofuturist registers for AI and the future of work

Abstract

This article contributes to sociolinguistic scholarship on register formations, digital technology, and labor by analyzing technofuturist registers—historically inherited, typified, and socially shared modes of speaking about technology. These registers create distinct modes of feeling, relating, idealizing, and desiring technology and its effects on society and our future. The focus is on recruiters’ and tech entrepreneurs’ talk about artificial intelligence (AI) as a site for the enregisterment of AI. These registers link recruitment and AI-powered job matching technologies to a broader anarcho-capitalist vision of an AI-driven future, one that both recruiters and society are encouraged to embrace. Centering technofuturist registers contributes to our understanding of contemporary language about tech, helping to understand how AI is made desirable and in so doing, how digital technology shapes the social imagination of the future and with it, reconfigures visions of labor, personhood and modernity.