CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Teresa Heffernan Artificial Intelligence and the (Post)Apocalyptic Imaginary
In keeping with traditional apocalyptic narratives, the prophets of AI have announced the impending birth of a “superintelligence” that has the potential to either destroy and/or renew the world. Yet AI as an existential risk has not only distracted us from the catastrophic reality of environmental devastation, species decline, and climate change, but has contributed to it. The “new oil,” as it is often called in reference to its lucrative potential, mimics the resource-intensive and climate altering infrastructure of oil and automobiles. While Google head Sundar Pichai plans to have “AI everywhere” and an “AI-first world,” this project challenges some of the founding assumptions driving this push for the omnipresence of artificial intelligence. It proposes that techno-utopianism/dystopianism is rooted in religion, fiction, and myth; and that the concomitant faith in algorithms effaces the differences between the organic and synthetic and language and code. Resisting the mystical and apocalyptic rhetoric of AI, I argue that it is important to restore the materiality/reality of machines: from conflict minerals to built-in obsolescence to water demands for servers to e-waste to the automation of race, gender, and class biases to the invasion of privacy and theft of data to the erosion of democratic institutions and the public sphere to the implementation of platform capitalism and the uberisation of work.