2025/08/05 by Tyler Blackman, Daniel Cockayne · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation
paper · doi:10.1177/14744740251358282
openalex publication_date 2025/08/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Work practices and workplaces are central to discourses about artificial intelligence (AI). This centrality is reflected in the ongoing introduction of AI into existing work processes and popular predictions about how AI will lead to job replacement in the future of work. We present a short speculative narrative that mediates between dystopian and utopian depictions of AI and its refusal to loosen dominant tropes that characterize AI’s uptake in workplaces. We suggest that narrative can be a method or practice for doing cultural geography, and our narrative offers a glimpse into our protagonist’s working life in an AI-dominated future and her more and less subtle acts of refusal therein. Informed by critical research in feminist economic geography and beyond on the future of work, our narrative dramatizes, in hopefully unexpected ways, what an AI future of work (refusal) looks like.