Us and artificial intelligence: questioning agency and the need for critical and humanist perspectives

This essay explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping political and social relations, arguing for the need to reclaim AI as ‘ours’ and indicating how critical and humanist research can contribute to this process. While AI technologies are increasingly integrated into public infrastructures, their development is mainly driven by market logics that prioritise efficiency, prediction, and optimisation—frequently at the expense of democratic participation, epistemic plurality, and environmental sustainability. The essay results from a two-day international workshop held at the University of Valencia, which brought together interdisciplinary researchers to engage in experiential, reflexive, and collaborative theory-building. Using world cafés, scenario-building, and AI-assisted role-play, participants collectively identified five key challenges of AI-mediated social life: the ideological framing of efficiency, exclusions within participatory processes, the epistemological authority of AI systems, the erasure of historicity, and the instability of predictive infrastructures. In response, we propose a minimal framework to reorient AI research toward more inclusive and pluralistic agendas. These include reclaiming predictive power, critically assessing participation and exclusion, and addressing the environmental and geopolitical dimensions of AI. We also reflect on the meaning of research impact in AI scholarship, advocating for a broader conception that embraces critique, friction, and reflexivity. Overall, the essay argues that reclaiming agency in the age of AI requires not only better tools or regulations but a fundamental rethinking of the social relations, epistemologies, and political imaginaries that shape technological development.