Science-Fictional Expectations: Public Beliefs About AI and Change in the Moral Economy

Drawing on 78 interviews and 12 focus groups, this study shows that science-fiction shapes the US public's understandings about economic consequences from AI, informing widespread concerns that sentient machines might fully replace human workers. Though popular beliefs are frequently dismissed as unimportant or merely ignorant, I find that these "science-fictional expectations" about AI's potential to out-compete humans also enable creative departures from the prevailing moral economy of normative judgments about market fairness. By imagining the possibility of AI becoming a rival group-actor in the labor market, participants subverted deeply entrenched, neoliberal cultural associations between moral deservingness and economic performance in two ways. Respondents who anticipated "labor substitution" feared that AI's superior efficiency would render humanity worthless, thereby reinterpreting the moral legitimacy of economic productivity as an existential danger. Others refuted this threat by "enchanting" humanity with enigmatic capabilities said to be unattainable by machines and more valuable than productive capacity. Whereas prior work has focused on deliberate efforts by political actors to influence popular judgments about the economy, these findings show that the public itself can creatively contribute to change in the moral economy through its unexpected, wide-ranging, and even science-fictional interpretations of social conditions like AI automation.