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.

Seed Generators:

• Aruna Ranganathan, University of California, Berkeley

• Batia Weisenfeld, New York University

Incubator Hosts:

• Jane Dutton, University of Michigan

• Jordan Nye, University of Michigan

The Center for Positive Organizations Adderley Positive Research Incubators invite emerging scholars to share new work or work in progress related to the broad domain of Positive Organizational Scholarship, supported by a community dedicated to helping them foster early ideas, generate insights, and see new possibilities for their core ideas. Incubators are an exciting forum for the growth, celebration, and expansion of research ideas aimed at fostering our understanding of the science of thriving organizations.

Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.