ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how contemporary imaginaries of artificial intelligence shape visions of the future and the assumptions about humanness they rely on. By analysing representations of AI in popular science, it explores how these narratives construct expectations, frame societal debates, and influence the cultural understanding of both AI and humanness. By tracing how these accounts mobilise hopes, fears, and normative assumptions, the chapter shows how popular science functions as a key discursive arena in which AI’s meaning is negotiated, and wider socio-political trajectories are legitimised. The chapter displays the narrative arcs that frame AI as inevitable, transformative, or existential, producing partial imaginaries that reduce humanness to narrow models of intelligence, agency, and sociality while obscuring the institutional and political conditions from which AI emerges. Arguing that narratives themselves are performative and future-shaping, we call for greater scepticism toward these prognoses and advocate alternative voices to develop more plural, situated languages of AI and humanness.
