Pre-framing an emerging technology before it is deployed at work: the case of artificial intelligence and radiology

Abstract

Various occupations are increasingly confronted with promises that new technologies will transform their work long before these technologies are deployed in their workplace. Although we know how new technologies are framed when they are introduced to work, we have limited understanding of how practitioners frame an emerging technology before it is deployed. Building on frame literature and examining the case of artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostic radiology, I show how radiologists go beyond technological promises by engaging in constructing multiple frames ex ante (pre-frames). These pre-frames are neither technology-centric nor work-centric, but rather are dialectic technology–work frames, through which their accounts of both technology and work are simultaneously (re)constructed. They not only help radiologists settle around certain ways of relating AI to their work, but also unsettle their accounts by unearthing unresolved debates, raising new questions, and impelling them to consider divergent reaction strategies.