Laurel Smith-Doerr

Smith-Doerr will conduct an inductive, qualitative study on the power dynamics that shape who benefits from artificial intelligence in the workplace. She will use the U.S. long haul trucking industry as an important case study to examine how truckers encounter and resist narratives which assume that AI can substitute for human decision-making on the job. Drawing on two social science literatures—organizational studies of safety/risk in complex systems (e.g., normal accidents), and science/technology studies of future imaginaries— she will seek to understand more fully how AI deployment shapes inequality and the future of work in the U.S.