Adderley Positive Research Incubator
Hosted by: Center for Positive Organizations

How Workers Become Captivated by an Imagined Future
Featured Scholar: Preeti Varma, INSEAD

Description: In an ethnographic study of employees at Multivex (MV), an AI development company building frontier multimodal AI models, I present a theoretical model describing the social construction of aspirational intoxication, defined as a state of captivation with an imagined future. I find that workers confront a tension arising from the simultaneous promise and threat of advanced AI to society’s future—a tension amplified by accelerating technological capabilities and nested competitive races. This tension generates an intractable anxiety (moral, existential, and competitive) about the future. Rather than avoiding or accepting this anxiety, workers engage in three cognitive processes—intellectualizing narratives, abstracting identity, and gamifying reality—that transform anxiety into fascination, significance, and thrill. This study helps explain how workers become increasingly invested in realizing transformative technological futures, and how such investment reinforces the competitive dynamics that accelerate their development and sustain technological progress.