Entrepreneurial subjectivity, expertise, and speculation in artificial intelligence start-ups in Taipei, Taiwan

This thesis examines entrepreneurial subjectivity in the artificial intelligence industry through an analysis of startup business founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs. In recent decades, increasing financialization has led to the emergence of a particular form of techno-optimism that is central to the ethos of these entrepreneurs. Through an ethnography based on 18 months of fieldwork, I show that AI and the economic subversions it will allegedly cause have profound effects on the self-making practices of those involved, generating forms of speculative value experienced as a sense of potential at the level of the organization and the self. To demonstrate this, the thesis focuses upon the process of subject formation in artificial intelligence work as an industry where models of the future economy are made visible through imaginative practices, including marketing, branding, and hype. I examine modalities of speculation characteristic of startup founders and organizations and demonstrate how imagined AI-enriched futures leverage their expertise while simultaneously reinscribing the epistemic authority of their work. I highlight sociotechnical practices of experts for whom breakthrough, mentorship and luck contribute to the reproduction of the expert community. The thesis draws upon science and technology studies, and social studies of finance, adding an examination of the personal lives of experts to studies of expertise and financial markets in anthropological scholarship and contributing a study of transformations in experiences of self in technoscientific capitalism to extend scholarship on the new economy.