Death by a thousand papercuts: professionals’ imaginaries on ethicalization and technological determinism of AI in Sweden

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

While Sweden’s sociotechnical identity relies on a firm foundation of the welfare state and a frontrunner status, its artificial intelligence (AI) trajectory increasingly clashes with global market realities. Analyzing interviews with 13 professionals across the industrial, governmental, and security sectors, this article investigates the reconfiguration of competing Swedish sociotechnical imaginaries. Findings demonstrate a shift from an administrative welfare focus toward a security-driven enclosure. Navigating the friction between mundane “weak” regulations and speculative “strong” futures, practitioners engage in “strategic oscillation”, alternating between framing AI as an unstoppable, deterministic force and as a neutral, steerable tool. Within this evolving imaginary, “ethicalization” functions as a performative speech act engineered to establish normative legitimacy. By mapping the discursive mechanisms driving the European debate on digital sovereignty versus digital resilience, this article contributes to the broader empirical study of AI practitioners within sociotechnical frameworks. Specifically, it advances research on competing Nordic imaginaries by exposing the structural friction between geopolitical technological acceleration and the preservation of a high-trust welfare state.